Low rise jeans are back. Abercrombie is cool again. Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie are filming a new reality show. Influencers are trading cell phone cameras for digital point-and-shoot varieties. Carrie Bradshaw and the baguette bag are once again en vogue. Women are thirsting for finance and football bros. And dresses over jeans are, bafflingly, a thing again. It’s safe to say the aughts are having a moment.

This could just be the typical 20-year trend cycle. (In middle school, I remember begging my mom to buy me a pair of bell bottoms covered in flower power patches from Limited Too.) Or it could be that enough time has passed since millennials’ and xennials’ adolescence that they’re now making art reflecting their experiences—and the cultural byproducts are inspiring a wave of 2000s fads.

Films like Kyle Mooney’s upcoming Y2K and Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman and Saltburn, as well as series like Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle’s Pen15, Meaghan Oppenheimer’s adaptation of Tell Me Lies, and Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson’s Yellowjackets lean into turn-of-the-century nostalgia, while eviscerating the era’s many dark norms. Popular podcasts like the One Tree Hill cast’s “Drama Queens,” Melinda Clark and Rachel Bilson’s “Welcome to the O.C., Bitches,” and Kristin Cavallari and Stephen Colletti’s “Back to the Beach” do the same.

Sometimes it feels like those years and all their scarring moments happened just yesterday. But it’s been nearly a quarter century—I’m married! I have two kids! I’ve gone to therapy!—and the passing time gave me the distance I needed to reflect on that period in my new novel Rip Tide.

Like the sister protagonists Kimmy and Erin in Rip Tide, I came of age in the mid-aughts; I remember flip phones and chunky Skechers fondly and the gendered, limiting mores woefully. As a ’90s kid during the surge of third-wave feminism, I was taught I could be anything, only to learn as a teen that it was better, nay safer, to minimize myself so I was never “too much” and always palatable to men: at school, at bars, at work.

With Rip Tide, I wanted to explore the wild, rocky transition from girlhood to womanhood during that era—the bubblegum cultural influences, the early days of social media, the pervasive rise of fundamentalism, the Madonna-whore complex stoked by tabloids, and the archaic power structures hellbent on keeping women in their place.

I’m not alone. Several other authors have recently mixed nostalgia with retrospective criticism—and the results are the stuff of millennial readers’ dreams. Here’s a list of titles that will make you yearn for the days of spending hours chatting your crush on AIM—and feeling relief that the only 2000s staples having a renaissance are its fashions: