The Unspeakable
And Other Subjects of Discussion
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
"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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Daum's second essay collection is an engaging but uneven follow-up to her acclaimed 2001 debut, My Misspent Youth. "What I was in it for, what I was about, was the fieldwork aspect," she writes in "The Best Possible Experience," a lighthearted essay about dating and marriage. Daum brings this anthropological lens to all of her essays, often weaving social critique into personal narrative. In "Difference Maker," she describes volunteering with the juvenile court system, leading to the revelation that "children who wind up in foster aren't just in a different neighborhood. They inhabit a world so dark it may as well exist outside of our solar system." Daum is a smart and candid writer, but the collection's title promises a kind of deviance that she never quite delivers. "The Joni Mitchell Problem" details her embarrassing love for Joni Mitchell and a dinner they had together; "Honorary Dyke" examines the author's skin-deep identification with lesbian culture; and "The Dog Exception" makes one wonder whether the world needs any more writing about pets. But in "Matricide," a frank and affecting account of her mother's death, Daum proves that she can wrestle with ghosts. "In the history of the world, a whole story has never been told," she writes. But that shouldn't stop her from trying.