These Millennials Can’t Get Out of Their Head
In Halle Butler’s new novel, young people won’t stop pathologizing others—or themselves.
Over the past several years, thanks in large part to social media, therapy lingo has seeped into the vernacular and is now a normal part of everyday speech. Selfish people are “narcissists.” Ungenerous behavior is a “red flag.” Calming down is “self-regulation.” Pathologizing others tends to be a way of enforcing unwritten social codes. Pathologizing yourself can be a way to exempt your own behavior from judgment (you’re not being mean; you’re drawing boundaries).
Therapy-speak has taken over a group of millennials living in the midwestern college town of X, the setting of Halle Butler’s Banal Nightmare. The novel lives up to its name in a variety of ways, none of which make for a very pleasant reading experience—though that’s never seemed to be Butler’s goal. Over the course of her two earlier novels she established herself as the Millennial skewerer in chief: She’s here to chronicle and cackle at all the ways members of her generation have learned to psychologically chase their own tail. For more than 300 pages, character after character implodes in a mess of overthinking and a tendency to assume that they possess unique insight into human behavior.
Banal Nightmare is primarily about Margaret “Moddie” Yance, an unemployed, perennially agitated 30-something who clings to the periphery of every social group she encounters and alternately berates and celebrates herself for each decision she makes. She’s recently left her long-term boyfriend, Nick, “a megalomaniac or perhaps a covert narcissist,” in Chicago and moved back home to her childhood town of X, where she hopes to “recover from a stressful decade of living in the city.” X is supposed to be like rehab for Moddie, a place where she can find herself again. Instead, she smokes weed on her couch while she watches bad network procedural dramas, humiliates herself at lame parties, and ties herself into emotional knots like a nihilistic Looney Tunes character. In one relatable moment, Butler writes: “Sometimes she felt she would give anything to leave her own mind for just one second.”
Butler’s characters have always been remarkably, hilariously alienating. The protagonist of Jillian, Butler’s first novel, scrabbles around her disappointing life as a gastroenterologist's assistant, scanning images of diseased anuses and sweatily lusting after a colleague’s seemingly more fulfilling life. Millie, the protagonist of The New Me, is physically repulsive—her face smells like a bagel, and her underwear has holes in it from her crotch scratching. At the furniture showroom where she temps, she continually fails to make friends or climb the corporate ladder, mostly because she lacks social awareness and the good sense to lie low. In Butler’s novels, self-improvement is always just out of reach.
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In our digital world, transformation feels tantalizingly close everywhere we look. Instagram is a sea of before-and-after split screens: a curvier body on the left and a leaner one on the right, a dilapidated house on one side and a crisp paint job with fresh furniture on the other. But people aren’t just sitting back and observing these metamorphoses. Everyday speech, on social media and in person, has adopted an overly simplistic vocabulary of emotional growth and well-being.
Of course, a greater openness to talking about mental health has its benefits. Plenty of people who may not have otherwise sought out therapy might find relief, and some form of clarity, in social-media accounts that promote self-care or from online counselors such as the “Millennial therapist” Dr. Sara Kuburic. At the same time, some of these figures have helped usher in a one-size-fits-all approach to mental health, with advice that is liberally sprinkled with jargon. Millions of viewers can scroll past therapy-coded guidance on how to “make space” for “uncomfortable truths” or “forgive your past self.” It can sometimes feel like everyone—influencers, friends in your group chat, your sister who lives in Portland—has adopted this type of language in their daily life and appointed themselves behavioral experts.
Likewise, the characters in Banal Nightmare—not just Moddie but also her childhood friends and their extended circle—are each sure that they alone possess the power to accurately read social dynamics, and so they peck at one another, interpreting every facial expression and utterance as evidence of psychological fault. As Butler examines her characters’ dogged (mis)interpretations, she casts each one as a little Freud in the making, and turns their world into a mirror of ours.
Kim, a college administrator and a vague enemy of Moddie’s, is the kind of woman who thinks everyone comes to her with their problems. “She was good at listening and good at understanding things from multiple angles,” Butler writes, “probably because her mother was a therapist.” Kim then proceeds to use her so-called expertise to write a series of emails to friends in which she explains that they are “slightly patronizing” and have “undercut” her, so she’d like “some kind of reparations” and hopes “this falls on open ears.” (Spoiler: It does not.)
Couples fight via diagnosis, each member thinking they’ve hit the bull’s-eye on their partner’s deficiencies and using psycho-jargon as a cover for their own flaws. “It’s pretty egotistical, if you think about it,” says one friend, Craig, to his longtime girlfriend, Pam. “Not everything in my life is about you, and when you make my problems about you, I think it makes it really difficult for you to empathize with me and give me the patience and support I clearly need.” Bobby puts it more bluntly when he talks about Kim, his wife: “She’s a fucking psycho, and any time I disagree with her, she says I’m gaslighting her.”
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At the center of things is Moddie. She feels sure that NPR’s dulcet tones “had something to do with the coddling infantilization of her generation who, though well into their thirties, seemed to need constant affirmation and authoritative direction to make it through the week.” Moddie is clearly self-aware, but she also feels trapped. A trip to Target for a sweat suit is, she claims, “triggering.” While she’s driving down a broad midwestern highway, “a car passed her on the right going much too fast, and she verbalized a lengthy fantasy about the driver’s personal inadequacies.” Moddie wants to get out of her own mind, but she also can’t quite get a handle on whether or not her grievances are sincere. Nobody can.
But what keeps Banal Nightmare nailed to reality is the fact that, underneath all of this emotional turmoil, we eventually learn that Moddie has suffered real, serious harm—dare I call it a trauma. She just might, as she says at one point, have PTSD. She probably was gaslit by her ex. Her former friend group really may warrant the label toxic. The story comes in dribs and drabs, and then in a big rush. It’s met with the same language her friends apply to everything else. But it also elicits something else: real sympathy, from some of Moddie’s friends and perhaps from readers too, who can see that all this therapy-speak is drowning out the signal in the noise.