In 2018, when Fiona Wright began writing Kill Your Boomers, the housing crisis was in full swing. Cruelly exacerbated by the pandemic, it is now central to mainstream political debate in Australia. The novel began with a dark joke among Wright’s friends that “there’s nothing any of us can do until our parents drop off the perch”.

Review: Kill Your Boomers – Fiona Wright (Ultimo)

Kill Your Boomers is set in Sydney, where real estate prices are the highest in the country and competition is at fever pitch. As of December 2025, the entry price for a property there was $1,150,000, well out of the reach of most buyers without access to inherited wealth. Due to the scarcity of available properties, electricity substations, tennis courts and other tiny strips of land not normally used for houses have been selling for top prices.

The novel’s flippant title signals its sharp flavour. Its accompanying promotional material likens it to Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation and The Menu, a 2022 black comedy horror movie featuring a homicidal chef.

In some ways, its quasi-realist mode is a departure for Wright, who has previously received acclaim for her essay collections, Small Acts of Disappearance and When the World Was Whole, and two poetry collections, Domestic Interior and Knuckled. Her work has previously dealt with disordered eating and compulsive behaviour, themes that reappear in Kill Your Boomers.

Improve your self-esteem

Thirty-something Kiera lives with two housemates in decaying accommodation that is desperately in need of repairs. She works part-time as a nanny for Johanna, a glamorous “natural” supplements executive, minding twin babies and doing domestic chores like making bone broth from scratch.

She shops for “pure” groceries, such as sauerkraut juice and nutritional yeast, and pockets a few items to feed herself in between. Johanna gives her free supplements with exotic names as tokens for being late home from work almost every day.

Aside from nannying, Kiera ekes out a living as a freelance writer, producing “articlectorials” with headlines like “Top Ten Tips for First Home Buyers (brought to you by Mortgage Choice)”, “Three Simple Ways to Improve Your Self-Esteem (brought to you by Ella Bache)” and “Are You Burnt-Out? Six Signs That You Need a Mini-Break (brought to you by Rydges)”

On a daily basis, she scrolls through news websites and social media trying to find a story so she can produce a “hot take”. There is a suggestion that she had hoped for a more successful career as a writer before she fell into glorified copywriting.

In her leisure time, Kiera compulsively visits open homes. She imagines herself living in them and what her life would be like if she could afford to own one. This obsession extends to reading real estate listings and reviews on her phone.

Her compulsion becomes more intense when things are going badly. After she injures her hand at Johanna’s house, she notices that her other hand creeps towards her phone repeatedly to check what’s there.

Aspirational markers

Wright shows how the vexed issue of home ownership can create fissures in relationships with friends and family. Kiera’s best friend Dylan is able to buy an apartment thanks to his partner’s inheritance and she feels it keenly. She had assumed they would always be renters together. Her mixed feelings – happiness tainted with envy – in response to Dyl’s good fortune are relatably evoked. “He’s worked so hard, lived so precariously for so long,” she thinks. “But so have I … and so has almost everyone I know.”

We follow Kiera through innumerable houses that are open for inspection. The pull of the crowd towards an open house “feels inexorable”, impossible to resist.

She dresses carefully to create the impression of a person with more money than she really has. When she arrives, she scans the queue to gauge whether she is “overdressed or underdressed or something else entirely”. She notices the expensively conservative attire of the real estate agents – one walks around in plain black brogues “so shiny that they seem to spark whenever they catch a beam of light”.

Kiera is very aware of the role she is playing as a prospective buyer. She goes through the motions of opening cupboards, looking under sinks, while wondering if the agents can see through her pantomime. The agents are playing a role as well, and must not call the bluff of visitors without means.

Some properties are luxurious and perfectly “staged”; others have broken roofs, brittle floors and closets for rooms. Based on hundreds of inspections, she notes that there is always a cookbook open on the kitchen counter and a bottle of “semi-local” and “hip as fuck” gin with two glasses to suggest leisure and relaxation. She discovers the bottles are filled with water.

Kiera is very aware that the props are aspirational markers, but they generate desire nevertheless. Her fantasies are shaped by the cliched real estate media she has consumed over her years of window-shopping. She lives in the future tense, imagining what she can do once she miraculously scores her own property:

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.

The hole in the floor

Worrying signs appear at Johanna’s place, when she starts eating Doritos and chain-smoking cigarettes. This prompts fears in Kiera that she won’t make her rent. She is filled with shame at the idea of asking her parents for help yet again, while her brother enjoys their approval of his successful life (career, house, marriage and a privately educated child).

Her squalid rental creates a sense of solidarity with housemates Soraya and Gwen, who live like there’s no tomorrow, drinking and wise cracking in the face of the climate crisis and potential homelessness. They would like to have a shelter to “see out the apocalypse”, but they cannot rely on it.

A massive hole in their kitchen stands for everything that is wrong with renting. Kiera and her housemates put up with this hazard for months without anyone fixing it. First, Kiera thrusts a skewer into its rotting maw; later, she adds googly eyes to humanise it.

When the hole starts communicating with her, Kiera questions her sanity. Its “shreik”, which only Kiera can hear, is uncannily human adjacent. This might be read as a sign of mental illness or alternatively as an eruption of the supernatural into the narrative.

The hole makes dark, provocative comments that tap into her suppressed thoughts about her parents’ generation:

They screwed you over Kiera – all of you. That’s all I’m saying. You don’t have to just take it.

Like a manosphere influencer, the hole gives voice to ugly ideas but also provides a strong sense of purpose.

The hole is reminiscent of the well in Haruki Murakami’s novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: a representation of the subconscious mind, which his protagonist Toru can only access when he is at the bottom of it. The well also appears in Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, where it is described as “deep beyond measuring, and crammed full of darkness, as if all the world’s darknesses had been boiled down to their ultimate density”.

Although it features injustices of various kinds – the price of housing in Sydney being the central one – Kill Your Boomers lacks the taut momentum of a crime novel. What it offers instead is a prickly portrait of what precarity allied with aesthetic aspirations can do to a person. Through her desperation to realise the “Australian dream” of home ownership, Kiera is turned against her own kin, seeing them as obstacles to her flourishing.

Yet she never seems to register that she is striving on stolen land. As Wiradjuri author Evelyn Araluen observed in a 2019 essay written from a half-condemned 1860s mansion in inner Sydney:

We’re taught to aspire to something bigger than we came from. Maybe one day we might have money enough to push my people out of Redfern or Waterloo. Maybe if we become rich, we can buy stolen land on my Country.

In common with the joke on which it is based, Kill Your Boomers may be triggering for some because, in Wright’s words, “it has the smallest grain of truth within it, deep within its horror.”

Wright gets inside the skin of her tormented protagonist, showing us what it feels like to long for a place of one’s own, without any chance of ever getting there, at least not without drastic measures. Her closely observed, genre-defying social satire will ring bells for people who are locked out of the housing market, and for those who care about such inequality.

Brigid Magner receives funding from Australian Research Council.