Megham Daum, c/d

Anyone else a fan? Only just discovered her essay collections Misspent Youth and The Unspeakable and I'm a fully signed-up fanboy. Amazing at cutting through bullshit to get to the heart of things, so candid and readable. Can imagine her creating something truly notable soon, tv film or novel, Bonfire Of The Vanities-style.

This is a decent primer: http://www.meghandaum.com/the-unspeakable/

My questions are, has anyone read her 2003 novel The Quality Of Life Report and is it worth setting my Kindle down for? And are there any other writers out there who sit alongside her?

There was a period of at least fifteen years, from approximately age eighteen to age thirty-four, when every interaction I had with my mother entailed some attempt on my part to cut through what I perceived as a set of intolerable affectations. The way I saw it, she had a way of talking about things as though she wasn’t really interested in them but rather imitating the kind of person who was. What I always felt was that she simply didn’t know how to be. She reminded me a bit of the kind of college student who’s constantly trying on new personalities, who’s a radical feminist one day and a party girl the next, who goes vegan for a month and doesn’t let anyone forget it, who comes back from a semester in Europe with a foreign accent. Not that she actually was or did any of these things. It was more that she always felt to me like an outline of a person, a pen-and-ink drawing with nothing colored in.

Really love her and think "Music Is My Bag" is the best essay of its kind. The novel is not as good as the essays, but definitely worth it if you're interested in her voice (which I am.)

Yeah Music Is My Bag is great, I highlighted so many chunks from that.

...“music lovers,” give off an aura that distinguishes them from the rest of the population. It’s an aura that has to do with a sort of benign cluelessness, a condition that, even in middle age, smacks of that phase between prepubescence and real adolescence. Music Is My Bag people have a sexlessness to them. There is a pastiness to them. They can never seem to find a good pair of jeans.

Who would you say has a similar voice? Desperately seeking more of this kind of non-fiction, but I think it's mostly down to her style of writing, how it's effortless and precise and kinda 'deep' all at the same time.

Man, I dunno. Maybe Amy Sohn? I feel like that 1990s New York Press crew is somehow the closest, in my mind, to a "scene" of which I can imagine Daum fitting in. But I don't think it's actually a great match.

Yeah, definitely a fan. Misspent Youth is terrific but I haven't read much else. Her columns for the LA Times are kind of cookie cutter, occasionally wrong, but always fun to read & have insight. I think that feature-writer journalism podcast has a good interview with her, but the presenter is kind of a dolt.

Daum's essay "Honorary Dyke" and her column calling for sympathy for Leelah Alcorn's parents both discouraged me from reading further in her work, so I'm curious to hear what other people itt find in her writing.

As far as contemporary essayists go, I don't know who sits alongside Daum, but Jenny Zhang, Jackie Wang, Kiese Laymon, Leslie Jamison, Sarah Schulman, and Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore are all doing exciting work these days.

I don't know any of those names! Thanks, will check out.

Same here, thanks for the recommendations!

Am I barking up the wrong tree with the Tom Wolfe comparisons? Can't completely articulate why but reading her essays gave me the same feeling as when I read Bonfire/Right Stuff, that whole 'ok now this is something I've never seen written down before but rings so true' sensation, combined with a super-easy-to-read writing style without it feeling dumbed-down or simplified.

This is what's left of my house. I did not own it but everything I owned was inside. Every house on the block is burned to the ground. #LosAngelesFire pic.twitter.com/61fO7d55hK

— Meghan Daum (@meghan_daum) January 9, 2025

Compelling 12-minute account of the past day:

Some thoughts from this morning. https://t.co/2ozXBvWJgP

— Meghan Daum (@meghan_daum) January 9, 2025

I knew she'd been flirting with the Intellectual Dark Web / heterodox centrism for a few years, but did not realize she had an anti-woke podcast until PJ Vogt interviewed her cohost, who apparently quit the podcast after taking ayahuasca and realizing she was no longer outraged about stuff.