Customer Reviews

My Misspent Youth: Essays

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

meghan daum is scarily perceptive, outrageously talented, and ridiculously funny. I read the essays in one afternoon and haven't stopped thinking about them since. Though other reviewers found her arrogant, i think they are mistaking her honesty for snobbery, and her obvious intelligence for disdain. Yes, she makes fun of other people (carpet owners, sci-fi geeks, and high school musicians in particular) but gets away with it because she allows us glimpses into her own carpet-owning, sci-fi-reading, oboe-playing geeky soul. If you think personal essays have to either be truncated memoirs or shrill polemics, read this book and enjoy the form at its finest.

Ms. Daum is very, very good. And hopefully living in Nebraska will help make her even better. There are times in this book she hits on so on the head it's scary; there are laugh-out-loud moments, so rare to find. But her irritating moments are SO offensive as to almost (not quite, but almost) negate the good. Ms. Daum is extraordinarily arrogant, and more than a bit of a hypocrite. Yes, she is self-depracating and "points the finger at herself" and all that other good-flap-copy crap. She is indeed...too obviously so. The self-finger-pointing tends to read as something she went back on the 2nd or 3rd draft and entered because she was worried she sounded too arrogant. Hmmm. Her essay on the polys was damn good, almost brilliant, until the last paragraph when her final conclusion was so hypocritical (jn the face of her previous essays) as to make me groan. Anyway, get the book; it's mostly good. But I think Ms. Daum will be much, much better after she's been around the block a few times.

Meghan Daum is undoubtedly a skilled writer. She has a keen eye, when she uses it. She is also arrogant, a bit of a snob and very very young.

I've been enjoying her essays in various magazines for some time now, and I was interested to learn that there is a collection of her writing, so I bought the book. As I started to read, I discovered that the essays started to run together in my mind. I was occasinally stopped short by her arrogance. When I read one essay at a time, these things did not happen, and I could go back to enjoying the fluently written, nicely observed essays about not much of anything. On the other hand, when I read them in a group, the weaknesses were more evident and the effect more of a whine.

So, my advice is that if you like this kind of thing (smooth writing, essays making much of very little), you may well enjoy this book. I just urge you not to take the edge off by reading it all at once.

After reading just one essay by Meghan Daum when it first appeared in The New Yorker, coincidentally the title piece of MY MISSPENT YOUTH, I wanted more, more, more of her prose. So I was understandably thrilled when a recent web search turned up this first collection of her work and, having read it, I am even more thrilled. She is really, really good. She's so good, she's scary. Daum's pieces share in common what she calls a point, which someone else bent on stuffy superlatives might call an overarching theme. Either way, she's not imposing some pat formula on life but has pulled out a bona fide truth about the human condition in its many different circumstances, that we simultaneously operate in two worlds, one a concoction of dreams, prejudices and cultural conditioning, the other, reality. Each of her essays is a moment of reckoning, of understanding how the imagined world has tipped the real one, of having to bow to the real one. In unflinching prose that just sweeps along, she pursues truth as a player, occasionally as a witness. The quality of her work reminds me of what Carol Burnett said about having no choice but to become the star because she was a misfit in the chorus: Daum, incapable of following through on requests that she submit to puppy mill essaying on Gen-X preoccupations (she's about 31), has positioned herself in the territory of Joan Didion and our finest cultural commentators.

Although many of her observations are dead-on, and I did enjoy a few of these essays, she too often comes across as an insecure, judgmental snob. It's fine to be self deprecating about her middle class, New Jersey upbringing, and I certainly understand her appreciation of and desire for a more refined existence, but when she lays into other groups who don't meet her high minded cultural standards she strikes me as mean spirited and immature. Her essay on her revulsion of wall to wall carpet and how she uses carpet as criteria to dismiss and judge immediately wore thin and made her appear shallow and a little pathetic. Perhaps she has to cling to her standards of superficial elitism and judge others because that's all she has, besides a mountain of debt accrued from trying to maintain this image.

Having purchased this book based upon an Amazon rec, I spent the first chapter cursing Meghan Daum and Jeff Bezos. It was EXCRUTIATINGLY true of everything I know about young adult life in New York City, and I hated having it served up to me in such precise, laboriously correct fashion. However, I persisted, and was ultimately rewarded by much of what I read...finally succumbing altogether when I reached the "Music is My Bag" segment; as one bearing the viciously peculiar scars of an adolescent oboe experience, I laughed OUT LOUD during a morning rush-hour train ride, and forgave everything remotely unsatisfying that had come before. Anyone who has ever had the burden of Eccentricity as Excellence imposed by a parent, for whatever reason, will both cringe and rejoice at this INCREDIBLY detailed accounting of what it costs to be too smart and unique for the flute (or its functional equivalent--name the field). Congratulations, Meghan: You finally put down that heinous 'horn' and its attendant reed making, as did I, and never looked back. I fantasize that someday I'll have the privilege of recounting "The Horror of Interlochen (Michigan) All-State Orchestra 1979" to you over coffee...I thank you for giving voice to every over-achiever who's ever questioned the mission we were unwittingly assigned, and found the courage to defy the twin tyrannies of conformity AND its evil twin, The Subculture of Bagdom.

Meghan Daum's essays are honest, spot-on and filled with insight into the angst and anxieties and humor that riddle the lives of thirty-somethings in the major NYC area---or any major metro area for that matter. At times she is a little too bitter, jaded, judgmental and angry (like some my friends pre-therapy!) but ultimately the humor always shines through...I cant wait for more, she is spot-on, a real find.... Brava!

Daum is a really really good writer. Her essay on the ease of acquiring debt in NYC is spot on, even ten years later. However, I found the rest of the essays quite pointless. The problem if you are in your twenties (as Ms Daum was at the time of writing many of these pieces) and have led a relatively stable, well-off life, is that it's very very difficult not to sound self-obsessed, because your "problems" and things you choose to write about are mostly likely not really problems or even things that cross the minds of 90% of the world's population. So you have to be extraordinarily skilled to avoid this because it's darn near impossible to have any real perspective, because you are so close to the experiences you are writing about.

In this highly autobiographical and entertaining collection of essays, the author offers insight into American culture that both informs and questions. From a Gen-X perspective, she focuses on the changing cultural realities of the 80s and 90s that undermine long-held beliefs. In addition, she turns a critical eye on her affluent adolescence in suburban New Jersey.

While it may be off-putting to some readers, it quickly becomes evident that the author approaches her subjects from a cultural elitist standpoint. She readily admits that she sought admission to Vassar to rub elbows with NYC elites to gain their cultural sophistication, as well as a sense of self-entitlement. In "Toy Children" she found the insistence that she play with dolls to be no more than an attempt to keep her in perpetual childhood. Forced by her musician parents to play the oboe, in "Music is My Bag" she grew to immensely dislike the nerdiness of the music culture. In an essay that overreaches, "Carpet is Mungers," wall-to-wall carpet, for the author, symbolizes everything ordinary - hence to be rejected. For her it is oak floors and Oriental rugs - or nothing.

In a more practical offering, "My Misspent Youth," the author decries the fact that NYC has become virtually unaffordable for an aspiring cultural worker - editorial assistant, writer, etc. Yet, she admits that her feelings of entitlement led to her assuming a sixty-thousand dollar debt for a three year MFA program at Columbia. "Inside the Tube" captures the diminished status of airline attendants, yet, they are "in a sense, quintessential Americans. They are at once rootless souls and permanent fixtures, vagabonds who can't stay anywhere too long."

Love and relationships are represented. She finds the members of the California-based Ravenheart polyamorous commune to be self-deluding to think that their multi-partner lifestyle verifies their self-proclaimed outsider status, being hardly different than common activities under other names. The author profiles the needy quest of the bland American blonde for Jewish men in "American Shiksa."

In the most interesting essay of the collection, "On the Fringes of the Physical World," the author details her intense multi-month email romance that transcended any real-world relationships, only to have it all suddenly collapse after meeting. She sees that "our need to worship fuses with our need to be worhsipped."

As the author claims, these essays are commentary on the authenticity of American life, on the degree to which we live fictional narratives. The essays strike an idealistic tone, perhaps are a bit arrogant, but they are perceptive, entertaining, and even unsettling. They are easy to read.

I'm a big fan of these short essay, memoirish type collections, so I enjoyed these pieces quite a bit. They may lack the insight and cutting wit of a Sedaris or a Rakoff, but they make up for it with their personal, honest approach. Also, there is something refreshing about the unhurried, straitforward tone Ms Daum takes, especially in the title essay, that is missing in the work of, say, Sandra Tsing Loh, who I enjoy, yet whose knowing, hip tone tends to grate and become obnoxious after a while. So, if you've read and appreciated Sedaris and Rakoff, and maybe Jonathon Franzen's "How To Be Alone", this is well worth checking out.