Meghan DaumRecensioni

Daum hits a raw nerve. She's a great journalist writer but I hope her writing will evolve to be more subtle and literary.

completely inane non-commentary which unsuccessfully attempts to quell "am i cool, guys?" class anxiety -- n. rochefort's monologue on irish girls in a certain groundbreaking youtube video could function as this review tbh. it's like 100% "my parents' 6-figure salaries are, in many ways, similar to my classmates' parents' 7-figure salaries" and then laying out, in unadorned list-style, what those reasons are -- pathetic, boooooooring, resonant for similarly status-obsessed striver lib girls with "intellectual" parents (to borrow the "music is my bag" taxonomic tool, imagine the "low" NPR lib w/high school english teacher parent or the "high" faculty brat).

the flight attendant essay is both the highlight and the most brazen missed opportunity. idk who the fuck assigned her to work on something Actually Interesting because she simply does not have the voice for it -- she herself says as much in the introduction and Boy She Delivers

american shiksa has some good lines but literally is just a tina fey bit; the polyamory one is similarly alright but has not aged well -- there are many Riper Examples immediately available to you on twitter et al any given week

cosigning other reviewers' pov: "thank god i never moved to new york" might be the big takeaway

I have not been asked why I don’t have children, but it has been mentioned, by people that I don’t know, that I must have children. Because I’ve said something nice to a child, because my “teacher voice” comes out occasionally, even just because I teach. The only people who pester me about when I’m going to have children are people I know. They don’t even ask if, always when, as thought the “if” is a forgone conclusion.

I’ve been making my way through this essay collection for the past year, pretty much since shortly after my husband and I got married. Until that point, everyone asked when we were getting married, so I figured once that happened, people would start asking when we were having children and ding ding ding! I was right! Thankfully, Ben and I are on the same page when it comes to having children or not, we are both in the middle – we haven’t yet decided. But I’d like the world to understand, just as the sixteen writers in this collection outline, it’s our decision.

While the collection claims to examine many different reasons for not having children, none of the authors really touch on anything besides choice. Most other topics are not covered. Most of the authors discuss simply not feeling the maternal instinct. While I enjoyed reading each of these essays, they do tend towards ranting rather than an actual sociological perspective which would be a helpful addition to society’s debate over women’s reproductive choices.

Not really my kind of book. Of course I didn't read the chapter "honorary dike" that's just too pretentious. She is very privileged. An "animal lover" who, of course, eats animals.

sometimes funny, sometimes harsh. Great read.

I became acquainted with Meghan Daum's work when she read at a 2016 Writers' Conference, a section from her essay "Invisible City," a very self-reflective piece on living in LA and the literary acquaintances she met there, including a rather entertaining if densely name-dropping starstruck anecdote. This piece is Daum at her best--a charming wit that can tell of the elite literary world without feeling exclusive. Unfortunately, this world as source of her content makes her stunningly ignorant in other essays and areas, as in "On Not Being a Foodie," where she is apparently unaware of the existence of those of other social classes and persuasions than her foodie friends, and "Honorary Dyke," which is at once offensive, an appropriation of queer culture, and thoroughly reinforcing the gender binary by means of Daum's insistence that she is an outlier from it.
Her perspectives are interesting and her craft smooth and well-managed, but her insistence on projecting her specific experience to the universal ultimately outweighs her skill.

An eye-opening look on the decision to not have kids. I found myself agreeing and disagreeing with the authors of these essays. But overall, it was a refreshing take on the lives of those who have decided to have children for whatever reason.

I don't know why I identified with Daum. Maybe I'm also obsessed with the trappings of life rather than its substance. I, too, pick my dreams based on a material understanding of things -- I strive for a life of hardwood floors, intellectual conversations -- a life of doing things for the sake of living. I related to all of her essays, even the snarky, supercilious ones -- especially those. It's too bad that so many of GR reviewers vilified the snobbishness in the writing -- because that's what I thought made Daum so strong. She swung into every essay with her own predetermined set of opinions and attitudes and used them to transport the reader into her life, to see things from her viewpoint. And even then, she even disclaims about her own snobbishness -- she was, in fact, one of those Music Is My Bag kids, she was one of those losers who fall in love with an Internet persona, she was one of those people buried in thousands of dollars of debt. This entire collection exclaims, "I'm imperfect -- in fact, like the world around me, I'm pretty shitty."

It's original and honest in a way not many books are. The style is smooth, fresh, cutting in a way that made me snigger. Daum's one of those writers who gets to the heart of her subjects -- or at least to the heart of her feelings on the subject -- which is something commendable. When discussing the family/colony of polyamorous lovers, she's not dismissive of their polyamory -- she's dismissive of how almost sheltered their lives are.

I'm a few years younger than Meghan Daum. Not many; I'm still Generation X. I want my generational credentials known, so that my objections to this book cannot be characterized as millennial snowflake gripes. If you were to ask me, I'd have my own issues with some of the areas she raises. I've read Daum's essays before and enjoyed them; she continues to have a good, conversational style, and I don't mind the personal navel gazing portions of her essays.

I knew I was in for a treat when right in the intro, she says "Feminism has achieved many of its goals." Sure, we have an equal pay act, but we don't actually have equal pay, so that's not so achieved, is it? It managed to exceed my low expectations; I kept picking up my notepad to argue with it. The best things that can be said are that it's brief and that she occasionally shows some personal insight.

This book isn't worth a thorough fisking because of its fundamental shallowness. Daum is interested only in a superficial reading of contemporary feminism as espoused in tweets, hashtags, and clickbait listicles. At no time does she engage with serious contemporary feminist thought or even indicate that she's tried to do so. It's like punching at air: sure, #badass on twitter is irritating, but she doesn't answer or even ask the fundamental question: are pussy hats and Everyday Feminism supposed to *be* feminism? Social media anything is doomed to shallowness. Saying that isn't getting us anywhere in exploring the differing meaning of feminism.

There are legitimate gripes to have with social media culture--the YA twitter dustups that have cancelled books (that their critics haven't always read) are a prime example. The internet "rules of engagement" can be used to quash sincere objections as well as bad faith critics. But there's no real depth to it, only a tirade.

Daum wants there to be a generational divide--and there is, certainly, to some extent. In her mind, the difference is toughness. Those of us who grew up in the 70s had the benefit of a more gender neutral childhood and then learned toughness in the 80s and 90s. Again there's something to the differing gender experiences of GenX and millennials and perhaps more understanding on both sides would be useful. The toughness argument, though? Yes, we tossed it off. We played the cool girl. It didn't pay off for us. Wall Street punished women just as brutally for keeping their heads down. There are generational differences that could be dealt with with nuance. Instead, we get "Young women are doing it wrong."

Daum believes that contemporary feminism is about casting women as permanent victims and denying our own power. I didn't see evidence that she'd even tried to understand her opponents' thought process. My experience has been that women are fueled by anger, not victimhood. Yes, there's a commodification of feminism, a branding, the lazy, hashtag twitter feminism. Plenty of GenXers have had their hand in it. Who created Lean In? Sheryl Sandberg did. She romanticizes her childhood freedom, but the GenX parents raising the "coddled" GenZ of today don't restrict their children solely because of scare stories about stranger danger.

She labels things like using PMS as an excuse "toxic femininity" and equates them to toxic masculinity. Again, lazy and shallow. Yes, women do this; is it worthy of analysis, yes; is it equal, no. At least she doesn't engage with race; it's peak White Feminism, but frankly it would probably have been awful if she had.

Daum perceives her peers, the NPR listening liberals, to be hypocrites who lionize Ta-Nehisi Coates because they feel they have to and will be lambasted online if they don't, while secretly disagreeing. There's something here to internet pressure and virtue signalling--I've witnessed it myself. But instead, she uses it as a springboard for her attraction to "free speech" YouTube, because it engages in different points of view.

In sum, this is 200 pages of complaining about how the the youth of today are snowflakes and social media is terrible, masquerading as an explanation of culture wars.

Unless you are fascinated by the real estate market, houses, architecture, floor plans, renovations, do-it-yourself home improvements and decor; this book is not for you. I happen to be obsessed by all of these topics, so I enjoyed this book.

As a member of the recently lamented “slow-to-grow-up” generation of young adults, Meghan Daum has spent her fair share of years living in spare rooms, shared apartments, and rented spaces. But unlike some of her generation, she longs to settle down with property and a house, and so spends the better part of two hundred pages chronicling her journey. At first, Daum is a sympathetic narrator — she describes her childhood games of playing house, pretending to live a frontier life like Laura Ingalls Wilder, and her parents longing to live in in New York, going so far as to claim to be from NYC despite living twenty miles away in New Jersey. When she goes away to college, choosing Vassar in the hopes of finding the means after graduation to a “shabby yet elegant prewar apartment in Manhattan,” she spends her time dorm-hopping or planning her next move. Astonishingly, after graduation, she manages to, with two of her friends, find said apartment; over the next five years, she goes through seven roommates, and finally “as I grew older and the roommate turnover rate grew higher , the place felt less like a source of emotional and aesthetic ballast than a crash pad I’d mistaken for a permanent resident. Worse, as my cohabitants became younger, my ‘senior roommate’ status began to feel less like a mark of distinction than a big-city version of being a college student who can’t bring himself to graduate even though he’s approaching thirty.” This flowery and dramatic language continues throughout the rest of the narrative, including Daum’s on-again off-again flirtation with the idea of a farm in Nebraska, subletting a condo in Hollywood from a despised woman whose faults include too many cats and candles, her despair over the housing market, and her desperation to appear as an independent, worldly woman who owns a home.

Although the book begins well, Daum’s pathos and constant equating her self with her prospects of home ownership grates after a few chapters. By the end, when she has finally purchased a home and is negotiating sharing the space with her new boyfriend, readers will be exhausted as she continues to moon over other houses and will be glad to get to the pat “home is where the heart is” conclusion. There is plenty to be said about the search for home, about today’s young adults and their delayed settlement into a house, but this book wanders and wonders too much to significantly address these topics.

I love a good essay or two about virtue signalling. Like most books of essays I read (which isn't many), I felt this could have been condensed.

3.5 stars -- I just can't commit to whole numbers! This book of essays is very well-written, but I would be lying if the subject matter didn't rub me the wrong way on occasion. In one (less enchanting) essay about Joni Mitchell, Daum credits her with teaching "that if you didn't 'write from a place of excruciating candor, you've written nothing." Daum does just that. Some of her confessions are painfully honest, especially her reasons for not wanting children, and her involvement in and understanding of the foster care system. She does warn readers in her intro that "this book recounts some pretty unflattering behavior" and in that regard it is refreshing. She is not afraid to tackle tough topics (mother-daughter relationships, marriage) with honesty and candor. And she is good at letting the reader in on the joke. None of it is meant to be self-aggrandizing or preachy. Instead she is just sharing some observations and experiences and widening the reader's world view (micro-view, in some instances) just a little. Best of the lot was "On Not Being a Foodie" and "Diary of a Coma."

A lot of the women in this compendium describe their desire to not have kids/have kids as a life-long, ever-changing saga based on what they're doing and who they are at the time they were asked. I think that is very truthful. Yes, there were a couple who knew from forever that they would not be having children, but there were also many who did a lot of soul-searching to come to that conclusion. Many who did want children but weren't able or circumstances weren't right, and now have come to change their minds. This is every person's prerogative, but the social narrative is still one of "maternal instincts" and not of a normal person weighing pros and cons before making an important life decision.

[a:Laura Kipnis|71247|Laura Kipnis|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1405548043p2/71247.jpg]'s essay struck me especially of all the stories told in this book. She talks about the social history (in the Western world) of the maternal instinct, how many changes around the time of the Industrial Revolution also changed the way we view our children. Infant mortality went down, making it more acceptable for parents to create emotional attachments with their children early on. Men started to become primary breadwinners, children were no longer needed to supplement household labour and economic needs, birthrates declined so families became smaller...children began to cost more than they contributed, and the motherhood narrative changed in order to justify it, turning children into beautiful miracles and women into naturally nurturing biologically dictated mothers. We can keep telling women who don't want children that they'll change their mind when they're older, or they'll regret it if they don't, reassure them that all women can do it, it's natural...but we don't realize how recent those ideas are or how dangerous it can be to call things "natural". For example, since women are such natural mothers and caregivers, they don't need social support for it, they can still take on the majority of the child care even when they're working full-time, etc. On the current declining birth rate, Kipnis says: "But until there's a better social deal for women--not just fathers doing more child care but vastly more social resources directed at the situation, including teams of well-paid professionals on standby (not low-wage-earning women with their own children at home)--birthrates will certainly continue to plummet." Hear, hear.

3 stars ONLY because her writing style is fantastic. I love how she analyzes her life and how she got to where she is, but some of these essays just irked the shit out of me. She talks of writing things that are true and not true, so I'm hoping that more than a few of the details are false, written just for the thought process and shock value of those who staunchly disagree with her alleged thoughts.

I am extremely picky about my books of essays. I like very few. I LOVED this one. I read them sporadically over the course of about a month. Sometimes I wouldn't even read a whole one at once. And yet, the thoughts and ideas and concepts not only stuck with me, but REALLY stuck with me. I ended up writing about a couple of her topics on my own online journal. This was really a very excellent read.

If you read a favorite author deeply enough, and if she's written enough books, you will eventually hit a dud. These are dated essays which don't hang together well. I already know about what Daum is trying to share here, through her other, better books and essay collections.

I continue to love Meghan. This is Daum #3 for me, and while I feel it's a bit weaker, and definitely less weighty, than THE UNSPEAKABLE or THE PROBLEM WITH EVERYTHING, it's still worthwhile. One part about her boyfriend's attachment to a couch that is too big for her house which he's about to move into was so funny I read it out loud to my husband. He cracked up, and said that if you just threw in a few references to European philosophers, it could have been Woody Allen. I hope she'd take that as a compliment.

I feel I share Meghan's real estate fetish, although she's taken it to lengths I would never have dared. The sentence in the book that gave me that "Meghan has hijacked my brain again" feeling was:

"[W]ith a few exceptions, I think it's fair to say that I've never visited a place without imagining myself permanently or at least semipermanently installed there."

I never knew if this was something that everyone feels to some extent, or if it was just me. Maybe it's just me & Meghan.

I KNOW I share her fixation on "Little House" and all things farmy and prairie. I rage with jealousy that she actually did move to a farm in Nebraska for a period of time. Just hearing her mention the words "Lincoln, Nebraska" fills me with longing. I think only she would understand.

The title essay is excellent. The rest rub me the wrong way. Too much of a Gen X "lol nothing matters" ethos.

I'd read Meghan Daum's THE UNSPEAKABLE and found I could not be impartial about it, because it was like she was talking out my own brain. I felt the same way throughout this book, except for the parts about her divorce (I am still married). So I guess I can't be impartial about that, either, in an opposite way - because it is so NOT part of my brain. The parts about her divorce were the least interesting, and I'm just glad they weren't dwelled on any further than they were.

Spoiler - if there's such a thing as a spoiler for a book of personal essays - the last paragraph is the best: "The problem with everything is meant to keep us believing, despite all evidence to the contrary, in the exquisite lie of our own relevance. What a gift. What a problem to have." Maybe it's not much of a spoiler, because I guess you have to read the whole book to understand it.

The problem with everything that Meghan wants to complain about most in this book comes down to "toughness." She was born in 1970, I in 1969. We grew up wanting to be tough. Adult. "Kids today," however, almost seem like they revel in being vulnerable.

We had Zoom. We had Jodie Foster and Kristy McNichol. We had androgyny, being a kid, not a little girl. Meghan hits on an interesting idea: finding out the sex of your baby before the birth didn't become a common thing till the 80s. Maybe, once people starting finding out the gender and preparing for it well in advance, with pink/blue parties and nurseries, this had something to do with the return of little princess girly girls. We weren't all tomboys, but no one in my generation wanted to be a princess. ("Kids today!!")

This plays into the main topic which is the problem with feminism (as well as everything) today. There's no room for being "tough" anymore; it seems we are supposed to be the opposite, and raise a big complaint about everything no matter how micro.

But back to my life! The first chapter is about the woman who used to protest pornography back around 1990 in NYC, manning a table with a big poster of a woman being fed through a meat grinder. I remember that vividly, in Grand Central Station! Meghan describes her as feral, kind of insane. I agree. I was anti-pornography back then, but the one time I tried to engage her, she talked right through me.

Meghan lived my life. "To be 20 years old in 1990 was, as far as I was concerned, to own the world." "I practically skipped to the office every morning." Construction workers would whistle at her/me "because I was 20 years old." She talks about re-entering the city now as a middle-aged woman. "Now that I had returned, it was as if my 20s were being handed back to me in used condition." I feel that way on every return visit.

I just can't be impartial about this book. Five stars for being me. I hope you continue to publish my thoughts in book form, Meghan.

I agree with so much of the way Daum expresses the issues we face in this very divided world---taking things out of context puts "everything" out there with only the extremes being expressed, loudly and forcefully, and the vast mist-mosh of those of us who try to stop and really think through issues are left gasping!! I think she is easily mis-interpreted -- again -- without grasping what she is trying so hard to surround with words---that vast middle area. This is the first book of hers that I have read but I see where she is coming from and am interested to read more of her work.

I have loved all of Meghan Daum’s books, but this one unexpectedly turned out to be my favorite. The subject made me fear that it would be a long slog, but it’s immensely readable and I found myself marveling at how much it resonated with me. Her take on today’s culture wars and the need for nuance rather than knee-jerk reaction is so sensible and so refreshing she’s getting a lot of backlash for it, as no doubt she knew she would, but I am extremely impressed that she had the courage to write it and I hope it reaches the wide audience it deserves and gets the appreciation it deserves.

This book was much better than I expected. I thought there was no need for me to read this since I've chosen not to have children and am comfortable with that choice. I didn't think I needed to know why others made the same choice. However, I found that this book is about much more than the decision not to have children. Many of the writers had reasoning I never thought about and there is a lot of social commentary in the book that's worth considering.

I was surprised by how many of the writers were childless by way of abortion or who had at one point really wanted kids. I've never been in the latter camp and I've always been extremely careful not to become pregnant, so I don't really think about abortion. It is interesting to consider how many different paths there are to the same end state.

I am happy to be living in a time where society discusses this issue and when we are moving in the direction of it not being a foregone conclusion that everyone should want to have children. Based on the conversations I still have regularly about my choice, I know there is still a long way to go.

3.5 stars.

This is an important book in that it reassures people (primarily women) that it is completely normal to decide to live child-free; and one can still have a fulfilling life. It is acceptable to choose this for any reason, since there are many different explanations as to why someone would decide not to have children.

The essays are not groundbreaking, but it is an interesting read, and a great way to begin a conversation - albeit controversial - as to why people make such varied decisions regarding procreation and its meaning in one's life.

I would recommend this book for people who have reservations about having children. Since this tends to be a taboo topic and/or highly private choice, I expect it would not come up in a casual conversation.

Others have reviewed this a little better, but I was hoping for more active choices than the more passive stories in this collection. I felt like one story was focused on again and again. There was a lot of looking down on younger people and the term "childfree" which I also found frustrating. There were essays I liked and I am glad this exists, but I think it could be better.

I took away an entire star because of the inclusion of Lionel Shriver's racism.