Jessie Stephens’s new book Something Bad is Going to Happen examines the mental health struggles of young Australians

It’s never been easy to be young. A new book by Mamamia’s Jessie Stephens examines the plight of Australians growing up in the age of internet dating and youth suicide.

Jessie Stephens has written an important new book about young Australians

On first inspection, Jessie Stephens’ new book Something Bad is Going to Happen, could be mistaken for a run of the mill romantic coming-of-age novel. But all is not what it seems. The effects of this book run deep. Because this book, as Stephens says herself, is written to start “a conversation about the complexity of mental illness”, which unsurprisingly, is no small feat.

Stephens, executive editor at women’s media company Mamamia, is no stranger to a conversation-changing project. Her first bestselling work Heartsick, a nonfiction exploration of how different people cope with the shock of romantic breakups was written to try and provide her audience with a book that she never had herself. And this novel is no exception, but this time she has chosen to change the conversation through fiction. As Stephens’ says herself, “in order to write the truest version of what I wanted to write, I knew I had to fictionalise it.”

The novel follows the lives of two Gen Z characters, Adella and Jake, and it is written from alternating perspectives in different blocks of time and with a few guest appearances from other characters. It relates the experience of living with a mental health issue when you are in your 20s to a wide Australian audience.

We first meet 29-year-old Adella at the dawn of a new year. She is in a psychiatric unit, where she is stuck wondering, “How had things gone so terribly wrong?” The book is then divided up into chapters set in the inner-city suburbs of Sydney which move back and forth through time ranging from about the early 2000’s to the present day. There are references throughout the book of a very Australian upbringing, such as watching playschool and going on a trip to Bali for ‘schoolies’. In this context each chapter details the pivotal moments in Adella’s young adult life, as well as in her best friend Jake’s life.

These moments include the realisation that she is not like the other girls in line to a club at the age of 21, her first drunken hook up, the acute feeling of rejection induced by online dating, the breakdown of a friendship and a personal tragedy. All of which are experienced through the lens of someone who is struggling.

Adella wants so badly to feel “normal”, “to learn how to be alive. But another part thinks that would be to invest in a lie. She had pretended to be one of them, hadn’t she? And what good had that done?”

In these depictions of Adella, Stephens is at her best, which is no surprise since she drew on a lot of her own experiences. She expertly navigates the strange paradox of being a young woman who knows how sexism and misogyny inform many of society’s systems but who still falls into the trap of wanting to be hot and likeable. “She wouldn’t ordinarily speak like this … as if she was some bra-burning, hairy-armpitted angry feminist who thought all men were predators. She knew it was ugly … usually she would drip feed this part of herself to anyone she was having sex with, a context in which she loved being small and weak and dominated.”

Something Bad is Going To Happen by Jessie Stephens

Jake’s perspective comes alive most poignantly in his interactions with Adella, which are often made up of Adella attempting to make Jake aware of the difference in experience between men and women. After one of these conversations in particular, Jake is left exclaiming: “It’s a Sunday night. Why am I suddenly in one of your feminism lectures?”

It is interactions such as these that demonstrate how Stephens takes great care to show both sides of the coin. It is not simply a female perspective (although it is mainly this) but one that tries to grapple with a male one. She takes great care to establish the specifics of time and place to tell her story and relate to her audience, which is largely a young Australian one. The care she takes on these details makes the book seem like a warm, comforting hug from someone who really gets it. This is apparent before the story has even begun, as Stephens’ dedicates her book to “everyone in my life who I wish was happier”.

At times this decision is slightly infuriating as Stephens leans into every single cliche in her sentences and doesn’t leave much up to interpretation.

Even though the book has an extremely important purpose and message, at times the sentences can feel a bit clunky and rely too heavily on well-worn cliches used in young-adult novels such as walking in the rain when something fails romantically.

But by the end of the novel this begins to make sense – she wants to include everyone. You can almost hear the author, who has just become a mother, saying, “It’s going to be OK.” And for that alone, this book is a very important new release.

Alexandra Hill is a new critic who works at The Australian.

Something Bad is Going to Happen
By Jessie Stephens
Pan Macmillan, Fiction
336pp, $34.99 (PB) $12.99 (ebook)