The Adult

The Adult is a novel by Bronwyn Fischer, published in 2023 and set during a young woman's first year at university in a city she does not know at all.

Natalie has left home for the first time and is learning how to be an adult without anybody demonstrating the process. She meets Nora, an older woman who is confident, mysterious and completely unknown to her, and the two of them are drawn to each other for reasons that are not the same and are perhaps not the right ones. Natalie's student life, with its roommates, classes and small humiliations, runs alongside an intimacy she cannot explain to anybody around her, and both women are carrying secrets that determine what the relationship is able to be. The novel is interested in the difference between seeming grown up and being able to look after yourself.

Fischer writes about the gap between how competent somebody appears and how uncertain they actually are, and she treats the relationship at the centre of the book as something that teaches Natalie more about herself than she wanted to learn.