Meghan Daum. (2014). The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Meghan Daum. 2014. The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Meghan Daum, The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014.

Meghan Daum. The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014.

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1. • value: family
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1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Daum, Meghan
   • bioText: Meghan Daum is the author of the essay collection The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion. She is also the editor of the anthology Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids. Her other books include the essay collection My Misspent Youth, the novel The Quality of Life Report, and Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived In That House, a memoir. Since 2005, Meghan has been an opinion columnist for The Los Angeles Times, writing on political, cultural, and social affairs. 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 Magazine. She lives in Los Angeles.
   • name: Meghan Daum

publishDate

2014-11-18T00:00:00-05:00

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fullDescription

"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.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Cheryl Strayed
   • content:

     "Meghan Daum's new book, The Unspeakable, is thrillingly good . . . Daum's powers as one of the most emotionally exacting, mercilessly candid, deeply funny and intellectually rigorous writers of our time are on glorious display."

2. • premium: False
   • source: Meg Wolitzer, The Wall Street Journal
   • content: "Someone (I'm never sure who) once said, "Write as if everyone you know were dead," and Meghan Daum really does write that way, by which I mean she writes what she wants to, without looking over her shoulder every second. In The Unspeakable her eyes are fixed firmly on the page, as are the reader's. Her mother's death, her own near-death experience, dogs, food, motherhood and, of course, Joni Mitchell --all are contained in a smart, strong and highly readable volume by this winning social critic."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Roxane Gay, The New York Times Book Review
   • content: "[The Unspeakable] is formidable, lucid and persuasive. Daum writes with confidence and an elegant defiance of expectation . . . There is no doubt Daum is a brilliant, incisive essayist. I would follow her words anywhere."
4. • premium: False
   • source: John Williams, The New York Times
   • content: "When Ms. Daum is locked in like this, balancing self-analysis with observation of the outside world, she's among the best personal essayists of a searching, cynical generation that's lucky to have her."
5. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     August 25, 2014
     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.

6. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     October 15, 2014
     A Los Angeles Times columnist unflinchingly probes some of her life's themes-"death, dogs, romance, children, lack of children [and] Joni Mitchell"-to find respite from "sentimentality and its discontents."In this collection of 10 essays, Daum (Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in that House, 2010, etc.) takes a look at her past, not with the goal of exposing past sins, but of exploring "the tension between primal reactions and public decorum." She opens the book and sets the tone with "Matricide," a piece about the death of the mother she both loved and hated. Daum neither eulogizes her mother nor seeks false solace in positive memories. Rather, she focuses on the way she packed up her mother's apartment just before she died, thinking "how great it would be if she were hit by, say, the M7 express on Columbus Avenue and killed instantly and painlessly." Daum leavens the discomfort her frankness sometimes provokes with quirkiness and humor. In "The Best Possible Experience," she writes about how, in her youthful quest "to live with authenticity" and "respect the randomness of life," she once dated a man who sought his truths in astrology and believed that he was the reincarnation of Jesus Christ. In early middle age and before her happy but childless-by-choice marriage, Daum became what, in another essay, she calls an "honorary dyke"-a short-haired woman who owned a dog that was "effectively [her] boyfriend," drove a Subaru station wagon and was often taken for a lesbian. In another piece, she considers her obsession with Joni Mitchell, a singer whom many perceive as the "mouthpiece for romance-crazed girls everywhere" but whom Daum sees as "the ultimate antiromantic" and a kind of emotional kindred spirit. Sharp, witty and illuminating, Daum's essays offer refreshing insight into the complexities of living an examined life in a world hostile to the multifaceted face of truth. An honest and humorously edgy collection.

     COPYRIGHT(2014) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

7. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     November 15, 2014
     

     Daum (My Misspent Youth) opens this collection of personal essays with the scene at her mother's deathbed and confesses that she wishes her mother would hurry up and die, setting the honest tone for the pieces that follow. The author proceeds to examine her attitudes about children, dogs, food, lesbianism, Joni Mitchell, etc., often expressing offbeat views counter to those of her friends--she prefers animals to children and devotes one essay to over-the-top love for her dog, Rex, while feeling relieved after having a miscarriage. Daum's fearlessness is to be admired, as is her writing ability. She's a skilled stylist who leavens serious topics with a smidgen of humor, such as attributing her dislike of food preparation to an overall laziness that arises from deep insecurities about not being able to master math, Middle English, and team sports. In the closing essay, the author recounts her close brush with death from a flea-borne bacterial infection with amazing detail and insight, bookending her memoir with her mother's and her medical experiences. VERDICT This book will appeal to memoir enthusiasts seeking an insightful reading experience that will entertain as well as challenge.--Nancy R. Ives, State Univ. of New York at Geneseo

     Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

8. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     February 2, 2015
     Los Angeles Times columnist Daum articulates “the spin we put on our lives” through a genuine, unaffected narration of her well-written essay collection. The audio edition is bookended with meditations on mortality: it opens with “Matricide,” the story of her problematic relationship with her mother and her mother’s death, and closes with “Diary of a Coma,” about Daum’s own very close brush with death. In between, she speaks eloquently about her choice not to have children, lesbianism, Joni Mitchell, Nora Ephron, foster care advocacy, dogs, and food. Daum writes with intelligence and wit, and she reads with the confidence of someone who has reflected at length on her life and her choices, and then mined that material for this collection
     of “unspeakable thoughts.” She employs an unsentimental, often inflectionless tone, most notably during “Matricide.” The exception to this delivery style is
     in her essay on dogs, where she is less guarded and more relaxed, loving, and poetic, breaking listeners’ hearts with the pain of losing her beloved dog, Rex. Daum is a daring and sometimes provocative writer; her voice is mellow and
     conversational, and she possesses the
     storyteller’s ability to draw listeners in with her pleasing rhythm and relatable experiences. A Farrar, Straus and Giroux hardcover.

popularity

213

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"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...

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