Synopses & Reviews
“Daum is her generation's Joan Didion.” —Nylon
Nearly fifteen years after her debut collection, My Misspent Youth, captured the ambitions and anxieties of a generation, Meghan Daum returns to the personal essay with The Unspeakable, a masterful collection of ten new works. Her old encounters with overdrawn bank accounts and oversized ambitions in the big city have given way to a new set of challenges. The first essay, “Matricide,” opens without flinching:
People who werent there like to say that my mother died at home surrounded by loving family. This is technically true, though it was just my brother and me and he was looking at Facebook and I was reading a profile of Hillary Clinton in the December 2009 issue of Vogue.
Elsewhere, she carefully weighs the decision to have children—“I simply felt no calling to be a parent. As a role, as my role, it felt inauthentic and inorganic”—and finds a more fulfilling path as a court-appointed advocate for foster children. In other essays, she skewers the marriage-industrial complex and recounts a harrowing near-death experience following a sudden illness. Throughout, Daum pushes back against the false sentimentality and shrink-wrapped platitudes that surround so much of contemporary American experience and considers the unspeakable thoughts many of us harbor—that we might not love our parents enough, that “lifes pleasures” sometimes feel more like chores, that lifes ultimate lesson may be that we often learn nothing.
But Daum also operates in a comic register. With perfect precision, she reveals the absurdities of the New Age search for the “Best Possible Experience,” champions the merits of cream-of mushroom-soup casserole, and gleefully recounts a quintessential “only-in-L.A.” story of playing charades at a famous persons home.
Combining the piercing insight of Joan Didion with humor reminiscent of Nora Ephrons, Daum dissects our cultures most dangerous illusions, blind spots, and sentimentalities while retaining her own joy and compassion. Through it all, she dramatizes the search for an authentic self in a world where achieving an identity is never simple and never complete.
Review
Praise for
My Misspent Youth“For several years now, Ive kept copies of some of these essays . . . by my desk . . . Her writing has a clarity . . . that just makes you feel awake.” —Ira Glass
“A Joan Didion for the new millennium, Meghan Daum brings grace, wit, and insight to contemporary life, love, manners, and money.” —Dan Wakefield
Review
“[Daum] is an expert at the kind of Gen-X nostalgia, California-mooning, cultural analysis that's catnip to me. I think I'll rub my face in the pages.”
—Sloane Crosley, Lucky
“Daum is a master of the bold admission. . . she's refreshingly at peace with her idiosyncrasies and limitations, including her antipathy to food and cooking, to having children and to wandering outside her comfort zone. . . Comforting ‘redemption stories about adversity's silver lining are exactly the sort of platitudinal sentimentality that Daum has set out to counter in this deliberately provocative book.”
—Heller McAlpin, Los Angeles Times
“As children, we're taught to avoid certain topics in polite company. As a seasoned author, Meghan Daum knows they're the building blocks of staggeringly good essays. That said, her latest collection is no confessional. In the intro she states, ‘While some of the details I include may suggest that I'm spilling my guts, I can assure you that for every one of those details, there are hundreds I've chosen to leave out. In a post-Not That Kind of Girl world, it's a bold statement, one that's echoed in ‘The Joni Mitchell Problem, the essay that serves as the book's heart. A perfect piece of writing, it swerves between analysis and fawning and switches points of view like its subject changes time signatures. As a critic, it's best to avoid comparisons, but one is unavoidable: Daum is her generation's Joan Didion.”
—Melissa Giannini, Nylon
“A collection of alarmingly sharp-eyed essays.”
—Amanda Lovell, More
“Meghan Daum might just be the new Joan Didion: a whip-smart, incisive, and often hilarious cultural commentator whose personal essays will stand the test of time.”
—Refinery29
“Sharp, witty and illuminating, Daum's essays offer refreshing insight into the complexities of living an examined life in a world hostile to the multifaceted face of truth. An honest and humorously edgy collection.”
—Kirkus
“Engaging . . . Daum is a smart and candid writer.”
—Publishers Weekly
“I think its fair to say that I cant tell you what Meghan Daums remarkable book means to me—the exceptional often denies verbalization. Her diverse subject matter aside—Mom, Joni Mitchell, the fetishization of food—its Daums galvanizing energy that one finds so attractive; nowhere in her work is there evidence of the ‘trance that Virginia Woolf said characterized so many womens lives. Instead, Daum builds her various worlds out of great presence and imagination, and who wouldnt want to live in her new city?”
—Hilton Als, author of White Girls
“People I know still talk about Meghan Daums 2001 debut essay collection, My Misspent Youth. Nobody writing about her generation was more incisive or entertaining than she. Now, as incisive and entertaining as ever, and having grown in experience, knowledge, compassion, and eloquence, Daum has clearly reached a peak. The honesty with which she explores our current culture as well as her individual conscience make this book as important as it is affecting. The Unspeakable is a brave, truth-telling book, a paragon of its genre, and a triumph.”
—Sigrid Nunez, author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag
“Meghan Daum is the real thing: a writer whose autobiographical essays—generous, frank, and unusually hilarious—reflect a steady, unflinching gaze at the truth. While ever alert to human fatuousness and contradiction (starting with her own), Daum actually adores the world around her—its wonder and strangeness, beauty and dilapidation—and conveys that love in a way that honors the reader even as it delights.”
—Terry Castle, author of The Professor: A Sentimental Education
“The Unspeakable speaks with wit and warmth and artful candor, the fruits of an exuberant and consistently surprising intelligence. These are essays that dig under the surface of what we might expect to feel in order to discover what we actually feel instead. I was utterly captivated by Meghan Daums sensitive fidelity to the complexity of lived experience.”
—Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams
“I loved these essays for a completely startling reason: they give voice and shape to so many of my own muddled thoughts—and to lurking sentiments Ive never looked square in the face. Meghan Daum is a cultural clairvoyant: in exposing her secrets, shes listening to ours. Shes also just a wonderful storyteller—funny, perceptive, and painfully wise.”
—Julia Glass, National Book Award-winning author of And the Dark Sacred Night
“The Unspeakable is a fantastic collection of essays: funny, clever, and moving (often at the same time), never more universal than in its most personal moments (in other words, throughout), and written with enviable subtlety, precision, and spring.”
—Geoff Dyer, author of Otherwise Known as the Human Condition
“Heres the skinny on Meghan Daum: shes one of the most humane, entertaining, and articulate contrarians youre likely to encounter in any book. She challenges our assumptions—and her own—in the bracing, unsentimental manner of great British essayists such as William Hazlitt and George Orwell. Her precision is Didionesque. Her humor detonates unexpectedly. In page after page, Daum pinpoints aspects of love, grief, and daily survival that youve sensed vaguely but have never found the words for. To read this book is to begin to grasp the intricacies of living in a fresh and penetrating way. I solemnly promise, lucky reader, you are about to be changed.”
—Bernard Cooper, author of The Bill from My Father
Praise for My Misspent Youth
“For several years now, Ive kept copies of some of these essays . . . by my desk . . . Her writing has a clarity . . . that just makes you feel awake.” —Ira Glass
“A Joan Didion for the new millennium, Meghan Daum brings grace, wit, and insight to contemporary life, love, manners, and money.” —Dan Wakefield
Synopsis
Winner of the 2015 PEN Center USA Literary Award for Creative Nonfiction
"Daum is her generation's Joan Didion." --Nylon
Nearly fifteen years after her debut collection, My Misspent Youth, captured the ambitions and anxieties of a generation, Meghan Daum returns to the personal essay with The Unspeakable, a masterful collection of ten new works. Her old encounters with overdrawn bank accounts and oversized ambitions in the big city have given way to a new set of challenges. The first essay, "Matricide," opens without flinching:
People who weren't there like to say that my mother died at home surrounded by loving family. This is technically true, though it was just my brother and me and he was looking at Facebook and I was reading a profile of Hillary Clinton in the December 2009 issue of Vogue.
Elsewhere, she carefully weighs the decision to have children--"I simply felt no calling to be a parent. As a role, as my role, it felt inauthentic and inorganic"--and finds a more fulfilling path as a court-appointed advocate for foster children. In other essays, she skewers the marriage-industrial complex and recounts a harrowing near-death experience following a sudden illness. Throughout, Daum pushes back against the false sentimentality and shrink-wrapped platitudes that surround so much of contemporary American experience and considers the unspeakable thoughts many of us harbor--that we might not love our parents enough, that "life's pleasures" sometimes feel more like chores, that life's ultimate lesson may be that we often learn nothing.
But Daum also operates in a comic register. With perfect precision, she reveals the absurdities of the New Age search for the "Best Possible Experience," champions the merits of cream-of mushroom-soup casserole, and gleefully recounts a quintessential "only-in-L.A." story of playing charades at a famous person's home.
Combining the piercing insight of Joan Didion with humor reminiscent of Nora Ephron's, Daum dissects our culture's most dangerous illusions, blind spots, and sentimentalities while retaining her own joy and compassion. Through it all, she dramatizes the search for an authentic self in a world where achieving an identity is never simple and never complete.
Synopsis
A master of the personal essay candidly explores love, death, and the counterfeit rituals of American life
In her celebrated 2001 collection, My Misspent Youth, Meghan Daum offered a bold, witty, defining account of the artistic ambitions, financial anxieties, and mixed emotions of her generation. The Unspeakable is an equally bold and witty, but also a sadder and wiser, report from early middle age.
Its a report tempered by hard times. In “Matricide,” Daum unflinchingly describes a parents death and the uncomfortable emotions it provokes; and in “Diary of a Coma” she relates her own journey to the twilight of the mind. But Daum also operates in a comic register. With perfect precision, she reveals the absurdities of the marriage-industrial complex, of the New Age dating market, and of the peculiar habits of the young and digital. Elsewhere, she writes searchingly about cultural nostalgia, Joni Mitchell, and the alternating heartbreak and liberation of choosing not to have children.
Combining the piercing insight of Joan Didion with a warm humor reminiscent of Nora Ephron, Daum dissects our cultures most dangerous illusions, blind spots, and sentimentalities while retaining her own joy and compassion. Through it all, she dramatizes the search for an authentic self in a world where achieving an identity is never simple and never complete.
Synopsis
A series of episodes drawn from the life of "Iris Smyles," a young woman courting (read: resisting) love and success, with absurd yet improbably poignant results
About the Author
Meghan Daum is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times and the author of the essay collection My Misspent Youth. She is also the author of Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House and The Quality of Life Report, a novel. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, Harpers, The New York Times Book Review, Vogue, and other publications. She has also contributed to NPRs Morning Edition, Marketplace, and This American Life. She lives in Los Angeles, California.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Matricide
The Best Possible Experience
Not What It Used to Be
Honorary Dyke
Difference Maker
The Joni Mitchell Problem
The Dog Exception
On Not Being a Foodie
Invisible City
Diary of a Coma
Acknowledgments