A book review disguised as generational anthropology
There’s something oddly intimate about inheriting a book from a television show. Not literally, of course. But emotionally. Over a year ago, after finishing In Treatment, I ordered Last Evenings on Earth at almost 2 a.m. because I wasn’t ready for the show to end.
I loved that show in the way people love things that quietly rearrange them. Not fandom. Not obsession. More like emotional recognition. The kind where a show becomes part of your internal architecture for a while.
What fascinated me most was that the series subtly showing this book by Roberto Bolaño sitting somewhere inside the therapist’s home. The camera never announced it dramatically. Nobody picked it up and quoted passages from it. It simply existed in her space, like part of her psychological furniture.
When I finished watching the show, I was curious enough to search for it online and order my own copy immediately. Then I did what people often do with books they think they’ll become someday: I placed it beside my bed and forgot about it. For over a year, until this week.
Recently, I decided to take a small break from smoking weed. Not permanently. Not dramatically. Just long enough to hear my own thoughts a little clearer again. Somewhere between low battery mode, boredom, and restlessness, I picked the book up.
It felt like returning to a version of myself I thought I had misplaced. Not because reading is morally superior to television or phones or modern distractions. I actually love television deeply. Especially psychological dramas. But reading demands a different type of stillness from you. It forces you to participate in the atmosphere rather than passively receive it. The third story in the collection, “Enrique Martín,” left me sitting in silence afterward.
The stories in Last Evenings on Earth revolve around exile, particularly among Chilean writers and intellectuals displaced after the 1973 military coup in Chile. Before reading this book, I only vaguely understood the historical context. Now I find myself researching dictatorships at 10 a.m. on a Saturday morning while lying under a blanket with coffee nearby. Which honestly feels like the exact type of life experience literature is supposed to create.
What stayed with me most about Roberto Bolaño’s writing wasn’t just the politics of exile. It was the psychological atmosphere afterward. The feeling of people wandering through life emotionally displaced by history. Not just physically exiled, emotionally exiled too. People drifting through countries, relationships, cities, literature, memory, trying to understand what happened to their generation.
Reading it reminded me of my own generation. Not because our experiences are identical to the Chilean diaspora of the 1970s, but because I recognize that same fragmented emotional texture in millennials constantly. A kind of invisible generational grief.
I think about the suburbs I grew up in. The people I grew up beside. The ones who never fully made it out psychologically, and the people who survived carrying the memories of everyone who didn’t.
Years ago, before the pandemic, my younger Gen Z cousin looked at me with genuine curiosity and asked:
Why is your whole generation like that?”
She wasn’t trying to insult us, she sounded genuinely confused. What struck me most was that I couldn’t even disagree with her. I understood exactly what she meant. At the time, neither of us really had the language for it. We just recognized the pattern.
Millennials were the last generation raised largely outside before entering adulthood during the rise of the digital world. We grew up playing outside, wandering plazas and parking lots, burning CDs, memorizing house phone numbers, physically disappearing for hours at a time without anyone panicking.
Then suddenly adulthood arrived alongside social media, smartphones, algorithmic identity, economic instability, and permanent psychological overstimulation. We experienced both worlds fully, and somewhere in the transition between them, something fractured.
Somewhere inside all of that, people quietly disappeared. Into overdose, burnout, depression, addiction, numbness.. or simply into themselves. Every generation produces its own version of exile. Some political, some emotional, some digital, but all of them leave people wandering through memory trying to understand what happened to the people around them.
That’s why Bolaño feels strangely familiar despite writing about another time entirely. And that’s also why I think my “Millennial Suburbia” series unintentionally parallels his work in such an eerie way. I created that concept long before I ever opened this book. Yet both arrive at the same emotional landscape: people surviving quietly inside the psychological aftermath of their generation.
That’s also what my work under “Shadow Work” has been documenting this entire time. Not darkness for the sake of aesthetics, but the emotional residue people carry after living through things they were never properly taught how to process.
This feels less like a book review and more like recognizing a language I had already been speaking subconsciously for years. It also feels like the beginning of me reading again.