Grow Up is a compilation of five short stories Taryn wrote for her fiction workshop classes and was used as a means to escape a mostly unpleasant college experience. "Weighted Words" was the first story she wrote at Emerson, and the earliest draft was written while she was hungover for the first time in her life. She has written sober since. Grow Up is a homage to navigating the dating world as a young adult, which Mike Heppner, author of The Egg Code and Pike's Folly, describes as "distinctive, funny, and shrewd."