FIONA WRIGHT Kill Your Boomers. Reviewed by Naomi Manuell

Poet and essayist Fiona Wright’s funny and furious debut novel tackles generational inequality and Australia’s housing crisis.

How did it come to this? As one character puts it in Fiona Wright’s new novel Kill Your Boomers, ‘Do you know anyone, literally anyone, who’s bought a house without having at least one parent die?’  But Wright’s story poses other questions, too. If a person’s only hope of home ownership (however modest) is waiting for their parents to die, then how long are they supposed to wait? And how long before people lose all hope and fall into a pit of despair? Kill Your Boomers dramatises the issues around Australia’s entrenched housing affordability crisis and what emerges is a very bleak picture indeed.

For the novel’s increasingly desperate protagonist, Kiera, the wait for the great so-called ‘intergenerational wealth transfer’ is likely to be a long one. Her boomer parents are healthy, happy retirees planning their golden years and spending their money in ways she disapproves of. Worse, they’re naively blind to the toll that cost-of-living pressures, precarious employment and substandard rental accommodation is taking on their only daughter. As a thirtysomething barely making a living in Sydney’s inner west (in Newtown, no less) any future Kiera might have once imagined for herself is now fast disappearing from view. Trained as a journalist, the only work she can find is grinding out sponsored clickbait articles in service of media’s new economic models. Unfortunately, this digital ‘piecework’ doesn’t even begin to cover her recent rent hike, so she’s taken on another job, caring for the twins of a wealthy couple in the eastern suburbs. As Kiera puts it: ‘This isn’t what I imagined for my adult life, but nonetheless, here I am.’

The book’s Sydney setting is a study in contrasts. Kiera swelters in her share house bedroom with a ceiling fan that shakes the walls and does little more than push hot air around. Meanwhile, her employers, Sydney’s out of touch rich, inhabit a seemingly frictionless space:

Everything within the Brierley’s house, from its benchtops and doorhandles to its furniture and cookware and appliances, from the children’s toys to the fucking bathroom soap dish, is beautiful and gleaming, unsullied. Everything works the way it should. Even the air smells deliberate.

These employers, particularly the mother, Johanna, who helps run a company peddling dodgy ‘wellness’ supplements, are exquisitely loathsome, entitled and vacuous. But entrusted with Johanna’s credit card to buy groceries, Keira reveals her own morally dubious side:

The first time I bought groceries for Johanna, I kept all the receipts and handed them to her the moment she got home that afternoon. She glanced down at them as if she’d never seen such things in her life, then back up to my face, her eyebrows knitted but her brow itself unfurrowed, somehow.

‘Oh babes,’ she’d said, ‘I don’t need these,’ and tossed them in the bin.

The second time I bought groceries for Johanna I added a bit extra – a box of overpriced muesli, a loaf of sourdough and some avocadoes – and took them home with me. She never noticed. She still doesn’t.

Keira craves respite, a place of security and sanctuary. She doesn’t want much, she says, but she does ‘want’. Lost in the endless cycle of scrolling real estate listings on her phone, she wanders around open for inspection apartments, imagining a better life: 

The main room looks out over the back garden … in view of an old, old Jacaranda that isn’t in bloom but I can imagine it, that purple carpet over the grass, and how I’d lie there, on my belly, in among the fallen flowers, and read across the afternoon, or open those big windows and let them breeze into the room. Out of season, I would buy fresh flowers and fill vases – I’d own vases – every week. I’d learn how to mow that lawn. I’d find tasks like this rewarding, even pleasurable, rather than annoying.

In one poignant scene, Kiera takes a late-night walk around Newtown, passing the various ramshackle share houses she has lived in over the years. Wright packs so much beautiful detail into these passages. They don’t just evoke Sydney’s inner west, but also the melancholy of time passing and Kiera’s dislocation as once-familiar streets become peppered with ‘for sale’ boards and multistorey apartment developments appear. In another scene, Kiera frenziedly cleans her house ahead of a rental property inspection, only to feel the indignity of a young property manager’s disdain. Here is a young woman barely out of high school but already making better money and driving a better car than Kiera can ever hope to.

Keira’s craving for the security and sanctuary of a place of her own becomes deeper, but also more unhinged, as her material life becomes more precarious. The pit of despair she finds herself in manifests as a hole – an actual hole in her kitchen floor, possibly due to damp (and which may or may not contain some kind of horror zombie fungus). As the hole gets bigger, it takes on a life and character of its own, and goads Keira into action. It gives voice to her deepest, darkest desires, and lays the blame squarely at the feet of her parents’ baby-boomer generation:

‘Think about it, Keira, think of all they had. Secure full-time employment, free tertiary degrees. Housing that didn’t cost them more than they would earn in sixteen full years. They had so much to lean on, Keira, that’s why they could stand on their own feet. And then they took all that scaffolding away.’

Whether or not Keira gives in to the murderous insinuations of her kitchen ‘hole’ is the story’s main dramatic hook. But the book also reflects the cost we all pay as the wealth divide increases and a changing economy shifts beneath our feet. The housing crisis continues unabated and this funny, angry and timely book will make an excellent contribution to the ongoing debate.  That we have allowed poor housing policy to destroy so much hope is a national disgrace. While the boomer parents in Wright’s story are decent, loving people, they also embody the naïve complacency of successive governments that have allowed this significant problem to fester too long.     

Fiona Wright Kill Your Boomers Ultimo Press 2026 PB 288pp $34.99

Naomi Manuell is an award-winning Melbourne writer.

You can buy Kill Your Boomers from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW. You can also buy it from Booktopia. We receive a small commission if you purchase through these links.

You can also check if it is available from Newtown Library.