Dumped and fired by her boyfriend/boss, Mae assumes her life can’t get worse -- until her Dad acquires a rare, aggressive form of cancer. When she moves home to care for her ailing parent, Mae’s routine assumes an aimless, horrible youthfulness: sneak out to the bar, avoid her Dad’s discussion of job applications, smuggle a man into her room, watch the vegetable garden grow. Mae finds release in wild sexual fantasies of a rough, Canadian cowboy, and uncomfortable and infantilizing camaraderie in her siblings, who gather in the hospital for Dad’s surgery, the hoped-for completion to his treatment. A dark comedy about coming of age as your youth falls apart behind you, Clare Barron’s You Got Older is a painfully hilarious and deeply emotional story that is not afraid to tackle the grittiest details of sex and death, or to illustrate the delicate moments that occur in times of passage.
You Got Older guide sections
