Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum, has it really been so long since your last book? I just finished THE CATASTROPHE HOUR. You continue to parallel me.

I too grieve my parents, their lives as well as their deaths.

I too don’t know what’s going on in pop culture anymore; I still think the “alternative” I listened to circa 2000 is kind of edgy. When I pull out the Arts & Leisure section of the NYT, if there aren’t any headlines on the front page about dinosaur rock bands, I just toss it.

I too have show more infinitely many parallel lives that look at me off in the distance, some even including parenthood. Some of those lives are doing OK; I don’t know if the one I’m in is the “best” one – OK, I know very well it’s not the “best.” But it’s OK.

My own catastrophe hour is a little bit later at night when I get sleepy. Something primal in my cries out, “What are you going to do with your life?” The answer comes out: “You’ve done it.”

I don’t know how to feel about the end of your book. All I can say is I do hope you keep putting out more books. show less

I'd read Meghan Daum's THE UNSPEAKABLE and found I could not be impartial about it, because it was like she was talking out my own brain. I felt the same way throughout this book, except for the parts about her divorce (I am still married). So I guess I can't be impartial about that, either, in an opposite way - because it is so NOT part of my brain. The parts about her divorce were the least interesting, and I'm just glad they weren't dwelled on any further than they were.

Spoiler - if show more there's such a thing as a spoiler for a book of personal essays - the last paragraph is the best: "The problem with everything is meant to keep us believing, despite all evidence to the contrary, in the exquisite lie of our own relevance. What a gift. What a problem to have." Maybe it's not much of a spoiler, because I guess you have to read the whole book to understand it.

The problem with everything that Meghan wants to complain about most in this book comes down to "toughness." She was born in 1970, I in 1969. We grew up wanting to be tough. Adult. "Kids today," however, almost seem like they revel in being vulnerable.

We had Zoom. We had Jodie Foster and Kristy McNichol. We had androgyny, being a kid, not a little girl. Meghan hits on an interesting idea: finding out the sex of your baby before the birth didn't become a common thing till the 80s. Maybe, once people starting finding out the gender and preparing for it well in advance, with pink/blue parties and nurseries, this had something to do with the return of little princess girly girls. We weren't all tomboys, but no one in my generation wanted to be a princess. ("Kids today!!")

This plays into the main topic which is the problem with feminism (as well as everything) today. There's no room for being "tough" anymore; it seems we are supposed to be the opposite, and raise a big complaint about everything no matter how micro.

But back to my life! The first chapter is about the woman who used to protest pornography back around 1990 in NYC, manning a table with a big poster of a woman being fed through a meat grinder. I remember that vividly, in Grand Central Station! Meghan describes her as feral, kind of insane. I agree. I was anti-pornography back then, but the one time I tried to engage her, she talked right through me.

Meghan lived my life. "To be 20 years old in 1990 was, as far as I was concerned, to own the world." "I practically skipped to the office every morning." Construction workers would whistle at her/me "because I was 20 years old." She talks about re-entering the city now as a middle-aged woman. "Now that I had returned, it was as if my 20s were being handed back to me in used condition." I feel that way on every return visit.

I just can't be impartial about this book. Five stars for being me. I hope you continue to publish my thoughts in book form, Meghan. show less

Meghan Daum is honest enough to admit something very important at the very beginning of "Unspeakable": she writes mostly about herself. So, logically, how much you enjoy this one might depend on how much you like her. It's not that she's a bad writer, mind you. Her voice is clear and her sentences flow easily. But if you prefer to read about policy or social issues from a disinterested perspective, this book may just not be for you. And that's okay.

If you are the kind of person who can't show more miss an article in which an up-and-coming writer discusses their life experience in "The New Yorker", well, you'll fare better here. Daum, to her credit, doesn't merely engage in navel-gazing. She does hit on some big questions. She discusses whether your life has to conform to demographic trends. She discusses her mother's slow, agonizing death. She discusses our relationship to our pets without getting all teary eyed about it. She isn't in Joan Didion's league, but she describes, as well as anyone can, the general weirdness that living in Los Angeles condemns you to. I don't know if any of the essays in "Unspeakable" changed my life, but then I might not be precisely the kind of person — or a person of the right age — that this book really speaks to. And that's not Meghan Daum's fault or anyone else's.

This is a fine collection of essays, and it contains one real jewel. In the book's last piece "Diary of a Coma", Daum recounts the brush with death she experienced after contracting an impossibly rare infection. It's something of a hybrid: Daum includes both her doctor's clinical notes and her own recollections of spending a few days in that creepy, placid space between life and death. The fact that she is able to describe the utter disorientation and inability to communicate she experienced during this time through on paper demonstrates that while her subject matter may not always thrill, she's far better than most writers out there today. It's a rare writer who can express confusion with such precision. This essay almost demands an immediate re-read. "Unspeakable" isn't quite my thing, but I suspect that it might change somebody else's life. show less

Initially, Daum appears to be continuing the critique of sentimentality she began in “The Unspeakable.” I was on board with her criticism of performative feminism, which reduces activism to strident hashtags and coffee mugs reading "men's tears." But I was taken aback when she questioned the existence of institutionalized sexism and suggested that the gender pay gap could be due to choices women make because of evolutionary or biological factors. By the time I got to her dismissal of show more Brett Kavanaugh’s behavior as typical for boys in the 1980s I was already running in the opposite direction. I really, really hope she hasn't turned into Katie Roiphe. show less