If the novel constituted the principal vehicle for telling suburban stories in the post-World War II period, in the decades around the millennium it has given ground to another platform: memoir. Such a development should come as little surprise. As members of the suburban baby boom have entered late middle age, they have become increasingly willing and able to tell their own life stories. Those who were cradled by the newly built habitats of the 1940s, 50s and 60s are liable to feel an especial affinity with these places. After all, they came into the world at the same time, a period often couched as a moment of optimism; by the same token, the maturation of the suburbs provides memoirists with an analogue to their own ageing. This personal affinity is typically tempered, however, by an awareness that a suburban upbringing is hardly a unique experience. In the opening quotation, David Beers describes how a realisation of the ubiquity of his way of life first occurred in childhood, while flying above his suburban neighbourhood in a light aeroplane with his father. The perspective is terrifying because it is so depersonalising; the details of a life diffuse into abstraction. But it is also instructive: identifying one's situation within a much larger pattern promotes an understanding of how one's life– and those of countless others– has been shaped by impersonal forces. The memoirist's retrospection may constitute a similar sort of optic, and perhaps that is what Beers is really describing here; as another memoirist claims, to have begun life in a middle-class suburb ‘entitles a person to a generic memory’.