Meghan Daum

This collection of essays from sixteen acclaimed writers, including Lionel Shriver, Sigrid Nunez, Kate Christiensen, Elliott Holt, Geoff Dyer and Tim Kreider, describe their reasons for not wanting to have kids and discuss the overwhelming cultural pressure of parenthood in modern society.

Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids

Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed

A noted essayist delves into our culture's most dangerous illusions, blind spots and sentimentalities while retaining her own happiness and positivity.

And Other Subjects of Discussion

The Unspeakable

Unearthing hidden faults in the American landscape, one of the most celebrated nonfiction authors delves into the core of our culture, speaking about the search for authenticity and interpersonal connection, the disenchantment of working in the fashion industry, and more. Original.

Essays

My Misspent Youth

A NEW YORK TIMES 100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2019 SELECTION From “one of the most emotionally exacting, mercilessly candid, deeply funny, and intellectually rigorous writers of our time” (Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild) comes a seminal new book that reaches surprising truths about feminism, the Trump era, and the Resistance movement. You won’t be able to stop thinking about it and talking about it. In the fall of 2016, acclaimed author Meghan Daum began working on a book about the excesses of contemporary feminism. With Hillary Clinton soon to be elected, she figured even the most fiercely liberal of her friends and readers could take the criticisms in stride. But after the election, she knew she needed to do more, and her nearly completed manuscript went in the trash. What came out in its place is the most sharply-observed, all-encompassing, and unputdownable book of her career. In this gripping new work, Meghan examines our country’s most intractable problems with clear-eyed honesty instead of exaggerated outrage. With passion, humor, and most importantly nuance, she tries to make sense of the current landscape—from Donald Trump’s presidency to the #MeToo movement and beyond. In the process, she wades into the waters of identity politics and intersectionality, thinks deeply about the gender wage gap, and tests a theory about the divide between Gen Xers and millennials. This signature work may well be the first book to capture the essence of this era in all its nuances and contradictions. No matter where you stand on its issues, this book will strike a chord.

My Journey Through the New Culture Wars

The Problem with Everything

Life would be perfect if I lived in that house

Chronicles the author's obsession with finding the perfect house, which culminated in her depleting her life savings to purchase a 900-square-foot bungalow with ancient plumbing and a junk-filled garage, in a book that explores the perils and pleasures of believing that only a house can make you whole. Reprint.

Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House

The cult classic essay collection from "one of the most emotionally exacting, mercilessly candid, deeply funny . . . writers of our time" (Cheryl Strayed, The New York Times Book Review). First published in 2001, My Misspent Youth captured a generation's uneasy coming of age as the world made its chaotic way into a new millennium. It also established Meghan Daum as a leading literary voice, widely celebrated for her fresh, provocative approach to the hidden fault lines of America's cultural landscape. From her New Yorker essays about the financial demands of big-city ambition and the ethereal, strangely old-fashioned allure of cyber-relationships to her dazzlingly hilarious riff about musical passions that give way to middle-brow paraphernalia, Daum delves into the center of things while closely examining the detritus that spills out along the way. With precision and well-balanced irony, Daum implicates herself as readily as she does the targets that fascinate and horrify her.

Anne Lamott

Yiyun Li

James Patterson

Brian Doyle

Kathryn Ma

Samantha Schoech

Good Writers on Bad Luck, Bum Deals and Other Torments Price: $16

Days Like This

A New York Times notable book, The Quality of Life Report is the critically acclaimed first novel by Meghan Daum, New York Times best-selling author and winner of the PEN Center USA Award for creative nonfiction.

A Novel

The Quality of Life Report

A master of the personal essay candidly explores love, death, and the counterfeit rituals of American life in this "brave, funny compendium" ( Slate) 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 powerful collection of ten new works. Where her previous collection explores what it is to be a struggling twenty-something urban dweller with an overdrawn bank account and oversized ambition, The Unspeakable contends with parental death, the decision not to have children, and more-a new set of challenges tackled by a writer at her best, investigated in the same uncompromising voice that made Daum one of the most engaging thinkers writing today. In The Unspeakable, Daum pushes back against the false sentimentality and shrink-wrapped platitudes that surround so much of the contemporary American experience. 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 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.

From the acclaimed author and columnist: a laugh-out-loud journey into the world of real estate—the true story of one woman’s “imperfect life lived among imperfect houses” and her quest for the four perfect walls to call home. After an itinerant suburban childhood and countless moves as a grown-up—from New York City to Lincoln, Nebraska; from the Midwest to the West Coast and back—Meghan Daum was living in Los Angeles, single and in her mid-thirties, and devoting obscene amounts of time not to her writing career or her dating life but to the pursuit of property: scouring Craigslist, visiting open houses, fantasizing about finding the right place for the right price. Finally, near the height of the real estate bubble, she succumbed, depleting her life’s savings to buy a 900-square-foot bungalow, with a garage that “bore a close resemblance to the ruins of Pompeii” and plumbing that “dated back to the Coolidge administration.” From her mother’s decorating manias to her own “hidden room” dreams, Daum explores the perils and pleasures of believing that only a house can make you whole. With delicious wit and a keen eye for the absurd, she has given us a pitch-perfect, irresistible tale of playing a lifelong game of house.

Julia Kerninon

« Ce recueil se distingue par sa qualité littéraire. Percutantes, souvent poignantes, parfois drôles, les contributions ménagent toute leur place aux nuances et à l’ambivalence. Elles élèvent spectaculairement le niveau du débat, quand la réflexion sur le sujet se limite encore trop souvent à une poignée de préjugés. » Mona Chollet, Le Monde diplomatique. Seize écrivains des deux sexes et de tous âges expliquent pourquoi ils ont décidé de ne pas avoir d'enfants. Certains d'entre eux n'en ont jamais voulu, d'autres en ont désiré passionnément avant de changer d'avis. Avec une franchise déconcertante, ces femmes et ces hommes racontent leur expérience intime, leur enfance, leur couple, leur vie professionnelle et décrivent ce que nager à contre-courant de la parentalité représente. Parce qu'ils n'en ont pas voulu et qu'ils ont dû régulièrement s'en justifier, ils ont beaucoup réfléchi à ce que signifie mettre un enfant au monde, ce qui fait de ces témoignages un ensemble réellement captivant, déculpabilisant, brassant des multitudes de questions (place de la mère dans la société, taux de fertilité en déclin en Occident) pour former un portrait nuancé, intelligent, drôle de ce à quoi peut ressembler une vie pleine et épanouie, loin des injonctions sociétales.

Meghan Daum

Books

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