Meghan Daum. (2010). Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House: A Memoir. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Meghan Daum. 2010. Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House: A Memoir. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Meghan Daum, Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House: A Memoir. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2010.

Meghan Daum. Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House: A Memoir. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2010.

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1. • value: Biography
2. • value: Humor
3. • value: Business
4. • value: autobiographies
5. • value: happiness
6. • value: Addiction
7. • value: mental health
8. • value: Alcoholism
9. • value: Comedy
10. • value: Divorce
11. • value: self care
12. • value: real estate
13. • value: self help
14. • value: Finance
15. • value: biographies
16. • value: self help books
17. • value: houses
18. • value: memoir
19. • value: Economics
20. • value: funny books
21. • value: motivational books
22. • value: business books
23. • value: self help books for women
24. • value: self improvement books
25. • value: economics books
26. • value: divorce books for women
27. • value: finance books
28. • value: funny gifts
29. • value: addiction books
30. • value: motivational books for women
31. • value: personal growth books
32. • value: inspirational gifts for women
33. • value: self development books
34. • value: a perfect vintage

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1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Daum, Meghan
   • bioText: Meghan Daum is the author of the essay collection My Misspent Youth and the novel The Quality of Life Report, a New York Times Notable Book. Her column on political, cultural, and social affairs appears weekly in the Los Angeles Times and is distributed nationally through the McClatchy news service. She has contributed to public radio’s Morning Edition, Marketplace, and This American Life, and has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, GQ, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and The New York Times Book Review. She lives in Los Angeles.
     www.meghandaum.com
   • name: Meghan Daum

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2010-05-04T00:00:00-04:00

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title

Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House

fullDescription

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.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Dominique Browning, The New York Times Book Review
   • content: "Quickened pulse, night sweats, insomnia . . . all the depredations of a love affair gone wrong. Anyone over the age of 30 who lived, worked or breathed in any proximity to the real estate market in the last decade will immediately recognize the signs of house lust. But I spent years as the editor of House & Garden, and I don't think I ever encountered a case like Meghan Daum's. . . . Life Would Be Perfect if I Lived in That House adroitly manages to be funny, charming and shocking in its brutal frankness about an obsession that threatens to upend sanity and bank accounts. Luckily, as was not the case for so many caught in the national grip of cheap mortgages, Daum's is the story of a love too big to fail. . . . She is smart about what makes a house beautiful in the eye of the beholder. . . . There's a mania about moving that cleverly masks a dread even more profound than that of not being human, and that is the dread of not being married. . . . Daum...
2. • premium: False
   • source: Sara Nelson, O Magazine
   • content: "A delightful dissection of the real estate obsession that's a hallmark of our age, recession or no."
3. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     March 29, 2010
     By turns disarming and tedious, Daum's (The Quality of Life Report
     ) cautionary tale about “house lust” tracks her dizzying succession of moves from New York City to Lincoln, Neb., to Los Angeles. Place becomes inextricably linked with being, and fashioning an impressive shelter creates a whole life, from choosing college at Vassar because it could ultimately secure her “a shabby yet elegant prewar apartment in Manhattan” to a self-empowering, self-confessed hare-brained relocation at age 29—single, and now an established journalist and author—to the plains of Nebraska to achieve the perpetually elusive “domestic integrity.” Desiring to be that person who “deserved” to have the perfect living situation, Daum is seized by full-blown real-estate addiction, despite her inability to afford anything like her dream place, and she eventually migrates from the modest charms of a Lincoln farmhouse to the “parched crevices” of L.A., where she aims to write a screenplay. Here the locus of her memoir fixes on the purchase of a dilapidated bungalow in Echo Park in 2004: becoming a homeowner translates into being an “evolved human.” Alas, the outcome is sadly predictable, even the finding-the-man-to-fill-the-house with, but Daum's treading in the wake of the burst housing bubble is sweet and timely.

4. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     April 1, 2010
     After moving around the country in her youth and early adult life, novelist and newspaper columnist Daum (The Quality of Life Report, 2003) finds herself in Los Angeles, single, thirtysomething, and more consumed with procuring the ideal property than working on her career or finding a spouse. (She refuses to let a man into her life until she can pronounce to him with pride: I own a house.) After buying and selling homes in various locales, she finally finds, if not her dream house, the closest shes come so far: a 900-square-foot bungalow in the Los Angeles hills that has fixer-upper written all over it (and costs nearly half-a-million bucks). And wouldnt you just know it, soon after she closes escrow, she meets a really nice guy. Readers riveted by matters residential may appreciate Daums tales of obsessive pursuit. But those less inclined to get dramatic over matters domestic might tire of her endless ruminations about square footage, MLS listings, porch views, and porcelain tiles.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)

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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...

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