When Claire Dederer recently rediscovered Reality Bites, the iconic 1990s slacker film, she realized it captured not only her generation’s cultural ethos, but its economic outlook as well. “I just didn’t think much about money when I was young,” says Dederer, the Seattle-based author of, most recently, Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses, a New York Times bestseller. “As long as I could put together rent money, finances never entered my head. I was more concerned with friendship and art and the like.” In her story “Reality, Still Biting,” she weighs the modern-day consequences of the film. Dederer, whose work also has appeared in the New York Times and New York, adds, “The real question is what’ll happen when it’s time to retire.”
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