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Three years ago, I moved back into my childhood bedroom. Around the same time, all my friends moved back into their childhood bedrooms, too — if there was room for them. (My friend Sarah's parents adopted a Kazakh orphan while she was away at school, so she slept on a futon in the hallway.) My bedroom was vacant, but my pack-rat parents had begun to use it as a storage room; it was piled high with boxes, and my closet was full of my folks' old clothes, things that hadn't fit them since the '70s. For maybe the first time in my life, I was part of the kind of thing that people who write for Newsweek and Psychology Today love to write about. Every magazine I read that fall asserted that recent college graduates were moving back into their parents' houses in record numbers. They called us "boomerang kids."

When I first returned to my hometown — a tiny, conservative hamlet on the Idaho-Oregon border —

I slept in the daybed my parents bought me when I was in the third grade. With its white iron frame — with little welded hearts where the bars intersected — and twin mattress, it had clearly been chosen for a nine-year-old girl. Worse, the mattress squeaked at the slightest provocation. I concluded I would not be getting laid anytime soon.

In high school, I was cheerfully geeky — editor of the school newspaper, a theater nerd, the worst player on the worst high school tennis team in the state. I had a place to sit at lunchtime, but never spoke to anybody. Most Saturday nights, my mother and I rented movies together. Sure, I'd gone to college and blossomed — in the way that geeky girls will, when given permission to reinvent themselves, and roommates who teach them how to apply eyeliner. But if the pickings had been slim in high school, now they were nonexistent.

Suddenly I was living at home at twenty-two, mortified by the thought of bringing a boy home. Grownups aren't supposed to negotiate parents on the first date; they wait until the relationship is really serious, or on thin ice, or somebody's pregnant or something. My folks also had the endearing habit of calling my cellphone if I did go out for beers with a girlfriend from work — as if I hadn't just spent four years off their leash, drunk off my ass a good portion of it. In their defense, these meetings were usually a good twenty miles from my house, and they didn't want me driving home drunk, so they'd just call and ask if I was cool or if they needed to pick me up.

Still, cool as my parents were, I did not want to have sex under their roof, and I hated thinking about all the lies I would have to tell about why I didn't come home if I snuck off to have it somewhere else.

Once, while I was living at home, and Mom and I were watching Say Anything for the millionth time, she said she thought Ione Skye's character had a weird relationship with her father. Until Lloyd comes along, Diane's father is her only friend, and that is weird. But like her, I didn't know how to lie to my parents. If I'd lost my virginity when I was in high school, I probably would have come home and spilled my guts about it, just like Diane did.

The journalist-shrinks all seemed to think we boomerang kids favored our parents' homes over the bright and terrifying world of adult responsibility. They made us sound like Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate, whimpering, when anyone asked what we were doing, "I'm just sort of drifting . . . here . . . in the pool." But, like most of my friends who lived at home, and like none of the boomerangers profiled in the blitz of articles, I worked full time. I didn't pay rent, but I helped out with other bills. It infuriated me that this trend was attributed to some soft-headed psychological bullshit and not to pure economics.