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"Neverwhere" by Neil Gaiman Neverwhere is the story of Richard Mayhew, a young London businessman with a good heart and an ordinary life, which is changed forever when he is plunged through the cracks of reality into a world of shadows and darkness—the Neverwhere. Learn more | See related books
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Product Details
Hardcover: 256 pages
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (November 18, 2014)
This book gets a star for being technically flawless and another for being mildly interesting. However, the essays display a lack of self-awareness that quickly becomes exasperating. For example, the author spends many pages exacting literary revenge upon her mother, in the language of someone who never passed the truculent teenager stage, for the mortifyingly embarrassing crime of trying to transcend her suburban housewife beginnings and trying to live a life on her own terms. The irony of this criticism is left unexamined, and pages are spent explaining and excusing acts of terrible unkindness on the part of the author. The essay on the author's appropriation of lesbian tropes, for example, is breathtaking homophobia disguised as homophilia (imagine the outcry if the author had appropriated African-American tropes instead). Once again, the author appears entirely unaware of this. And so it goes, on and on.
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What a great collection of essays. Meghan Daum is a deep thinker, able to describe intangibles with such richness that at times I felt I was processing her words with my emotions rather than logic. Here's an example, from the chapter entitled "Not What It Used to Be," which was about perspective at midlife:
"Most of us have unconscious disbeliefs about our lives, facts that we accept at face value but that still cause us to gasp just a little when they pass through our minds at certain angles. Mine are these: that my mother is dead..."
and in the same chapter:
"What I miss (from my youth) is the feeling that nothing has started yet, that the future towers over the past, that the present is merely a planning phase for the gleaming architecture that will make up the skyline of the rest of my life."
These are just two examples from one essay. There is so much more in this book, not the least of which is her humor. In the first chapter, in which she chronicles her mother's death, Daum says,
"It's amazing what the living expect of the dying. We expect wisdom, insight, burst of clarity that are then reported back to the undying in the urgent staccato of a telegram: I HAVE THE ANSWER. STOP. THEY'RE WAITING FOR ME. STOP. EVERYONE WHO DIED BEFORE. STOP. AND THEY LOOK GREAT. STOP."
Meghan Daum's writing is never so profound as in the last chapter where she describes occupying the thinnest strip of existence between life and death, in October 2010. She almost died from a bacterial infection that confounded the doctors (who could not have saved her; her body somehow saved itself).
Daum's writing isn't difficult to understand, but it's deep, multihued, and layered.Read more ›
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59 of 64 people found the following review helpful
I loved Meghan Daum's early work so much that I required students to read it. She was, and is, an immensely gifted stylist. And I admire her prose sufficiently to have read every word of "Unspeakable." Indeed, I bought the collection as soon as it was available. Others may have different reactions, but I was floored by how immensely petty and mean-spirited the essay "Matricide" was. Her mother's chief offenses seem to have been reinventing herself after a marital separation and fishing for praise from her unimpressed and disengaged daughter, but to read this essay, you'd think she'd maintained a second, secret life as a serial killer...or that Daum is withholding something much darker and more disturbing about her mother. The essay is, indeed, a kind of matricide, and as I am dealing with a difficult elderly mother myself, I was prepared to feel empathy; but the hateful, mocking tone of this gives readers more information about Daum than her mother who, after all, can't defend herself now that she's dead. Hugely disappointing and disturbing and far clunkier than the more nuanced pieces we've come to expect from this writer. She writes about her friendship with Norah Ephron and her attendance at a party with A-listers that Ephron threw, at which Daum felt ill at ease. She writes about her serious illness without explicitly identifying it (it's just "a virus"), and her references to her husband are bewilderingly cold and detached...all we know about him is that he'd like to have a child (Daum claims not to be maternal) and that he writes in the science field. She writes about having Lesbian sensibilities without being Lesbian, which perhaps would be fertile ground for a writer to explore, but the piece reads like it was written to increase her book's required word count.Read more ›
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"The Unspeakable and Other Subjects of Discussion" authored by Meghan Daum features 10 genuine revealing essays on subject matters ranging from health, diet/food, her personal relationships, family, pets, celebrity and more. Daum examines her guilt over not feeling the way she is "supposed" too, especially in regards to her mothers passing. She discloses "unflattering" things about herself that some of her readers might find "alarming and depressing" and most certainly controversial.
The first essay "Matricide" is the finest, longest and most compelling. Daum recalls her grandmother as "stubborn, self-centered and illogical" she died at age 91. Daum, and her mother, felt the grandmother was intellectually disabled. At 45 years of age, Daum's mother, a high school teacher, reinvented herself; changed her dress and style, separated from Meghan's father. Daum recalled her mother being "an outline of a pen and ink drawing with nothing colored in." Daum's father seemed awkward and misplaced in their lives, her parents never divorced; there was undoubtably more to the story then revealed. The women of this family did not seem to understand or appreciate each other in any fashion. Daum seemed profoundly disappointed and unforgiving of her mother's humanity, she was unable to accept her. This may have lead, at least in part, to the odd emotional detachment and disconnection she described at her mothers passing from gallbladder cancer. This was a very sad piece, and harsh on the maternal heart, though exceptionally articulated and written.
"Honorary Dyke" was a fascinating look at how Daum decided to look, act and reinvent herself in a (butch) lesbian form/look; and associate closely with lesbian friends.Read more ›
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This item: The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion
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