Author Malavika Kannan Is Being Hailed As a Voice of Gen Z. These Coming-of-Age Novels Shaped Her
Her must-read adult debut, 'Unprecedented Times', follows a college freshman as the COVID-19 pandemic upends her life.
When you're looking to get lost in a book, sometimes you need your reading material to match your mood. With Marie Claire's series "Buy the Book," we do the heavy lifting for you. We're offering curated, highly specific recommendations for whatever you're looking for—whether you're in your feels or hooked on a subgenre trending on #BookTok.
In this author-curated rendition, Malavika Kannan—activist, Quarter Life Crisis Substack writer, and author of YA novels All the Yellow Suns and The Bookweaver's Daughter—shares what coming-of-age stories inspired her adult debut, Unprecedented Times.
Not every writer is hailed as a voice of their generation, but Malavika Kannan has been since her teens. The 25-year-old established herself as a teenage activist, building a following while organizing movements like March for Our Lives and the Women’s March, and has written viral essays on Gen Z media and politics. So when it came to writing her first adult novel, she knew she wanted it to be “a good Gen Z novel.”
“My favorite musician Nina Simone once said it's an artist's duty to ‘reflect the times,’” Kannan tells Marie Claire. “I set out to write a novel with plot—but also a novel of ideas, theorizing about community, kinship, and identity.”
The result is Unprecedented Times, which examines the impact of “the pandemic, climate change, and other forms of systemic 21st-century violence on young Americans.” It’s a timeless coming-of-age story—yet one that will feel all too familiar to those whose campus experiences were put on pause by COVID-19. The highly anticipated novel, out August 18, follows Stanford freshman Rishi as she retreats to a farming collective across the country when her classes turn virtual in 2020.
“I like the coming-of-age genre because, in real time, you can see women making choices for their lives (and facing the consequences for them),” says Kannan, who’s published two YA hits. “My main theme as a writer is the question of agency in women's lives: What personal and political factors shape the choices we make?”
She explains that contemporary fiction by female authors—largely published during the first Trump presidency—informed her adult debut. They were her “gateway drug” in falling back in love with reading during the pandemic, and wound up on her bibliography once Unprecedented Times first took form as her Stanford honors thesis. “It made me see my work as part of a tradition, like I was picking up the call in a long game of telephone, adding in my own political and formal innovations.”
Below, Kannan shares the books that inspired her new release, from collegiate bestsellers to certified classics.
"Problems is a criminally-underrated autofictional novel about a young Indian American writer who’s addicted to heroin and is hemorrhaging all her relationships. It felt like a gut punch to read about such a difficult, tragic life—both inspiration and cautionary tale for a writer, like me, who feels and hurts deeply. On the other hand, Problems taught me how to write with humor about depravity. I was so moved when I finished this book that I tried to email Jade Sharma, only to learn she’d passed away earlier that year, 2019. There was originally a scene in Unprecedented Times where Rishi has that experience of failing to contact a dead literary foremother, but I had to cut it. I hope it would make Sharma proud to know this book continues in her lineage."
"The Idiot is the OG campus novel about a deep-thinking, lowkey-lesbian, language-addicted Harvard freshman. I made it my entire personality in college, foisted it on all my friends and lovers, and attended at least three of Batuman’s talks. The Idiot was transformative to me in that it attuned me to the narrative richness and potential of the campus as a literary setting, even if I was sometimes baffled by its lack of political urgency. In response, I became committed to writing about students for whom love and literature are inextricable from politics and other pressures."
"The first time I read this queer, anti-capitalist, coming-of-age novel, it felt so familiar I would get too excited and have to stop reading. This book showed me how you could pull off a coming-of-age narrative with an ensemble cast, and how to earnestly, seductively incorporate a political framework into fiction. You can see Mathews’ influence in how Unprecedented Times starts off relatively calm, but the big plot engines—capitalism, in her novel; the pandemic and patriarchy, in mine—loom larger and larger, until they become impossible to ignore."
"Like everyone and their mother, I read Sally Rooney’s novels during the pandemic. I used to be a hater; in 2021, the year I started Unprecedented Times, I even published a viral article about how whiteness, uninterrogated, undergirds the universality afforded to her works. Even so, I knew when I started my novel that I was indebted to Sally Rooney because her success created the market for works like mine: literary and attuned to the interiority of young women. I also get Rooney allegations for the stylistic decision I made to drop quotation marks in Unprecedented Times."
"Another pandemic hit, My Year of Rest and Relaxation managed to tap into something essential and unspoken about girlhood: its disgustingness and its revulsion. I was inspired by Moshfegh to write Rishi’s first-person narration without any concern for her likeability in the reader’s eyes. I took off the mittens. This helped me arrive at the narrative tone that feels distinctly Gen Z: irreverent and out of pocket, the no-holds-barred tone of a teenage girl who grew up oversharing on the internet."
"Their Eyes Were Watching God is, to me, the biblical text about being a free-loving Florida woman, and how you navigate love when your experiences and opportunities are so different from the previous generations. Obviously, the stakes are quite different between Janie, the granddaughter of an enslaved woman, and Rishi, the daughter of an Indian immigrant, but the questions of possibility and agency feel analogous. Unprecedented Times pays direct homage to Their Eyes Were Watching God by borrowing its structure of three romantic relationships, back-to-back, that help the protagonist uncover truths about herself."
