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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)
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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37 of 41 people found the following review helpful
I haven't finished the book yet, but I don't think that's required to know that Meghan Daum nailed it.
I came home last night way past my bedtime and picked up the book when I should have been asleep. It was an exercise is sheer willpower to put it down in the middle for the first essay "Matricide." Just a few sentences in and I'm dying to know what went down during the last days of her mother's life, which would make normally make me feel guilty and a little gross, but somehow not in this case. Daum makes you feel like it's okay to look (Which is a testament to her craft), and it seems to me that this whole book is about that: it's okay not to be grief stricken when your mother dies, it's okay to not change after a traumatic experience, it's okay to love your dog more than your boyfriend (my words, not hers, extrapolating a bit here) and it's okay to not buy into precious food culture. Especially cool to read stuff like this after turning 40, when you all of sudden don't care at all about your own peccadilloes (oh, say, an obsession with wallpaper or the Real Housewives franchise) and want someone else to say that they too, are not buying in either to all the overwrought, manufactured "appropriate" responses to life's big and small issues.
I loved Daum's last book, "Life Would Be Perfect if I Lived in That House" because she wove together a personal narrative about a seemingly singular obsession with real estate with what ultimately turns out to be a common, universal obsession with real estate. I think the same is about to happen here, and I can't wait.
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26 of 30 people found the following review helpful
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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Meghan Daum writes a consistently character-ed collection of personal essays on potentially life changing but rather mundane events and her reactions to them. Anyone who puts them self out there in this fashion and writes with truth about their own life is in my book, courageous. Daum is most certainly entitled to feel as she does though I did not get the sense of shock value that seemed to be the themed promise of the many reviews I read previous to reading. Due to the heavy promotion of this book, I found the lack of more reviews on Amazon surprising. I waited a long time to read this book. I won’t say that I was disappointed however I did not feel a sense of relevance to my own life though I could relate to some of her experiences. Daum mostly seems stuck in a small box of a life that though perfectly typical, seems sad by way of her narrow focus or perhaps lack of ability to see things in a larger context. In other words she comes across here as overly egocentric and it doesn’t appear to be serving her. She has a writing style to aspire to yet I kept picturing her with a thesaurus constantly in hand serving up the most impressive words she could find. If she does have that much of a command on vocabulary, I find that very impressive but I found her over emphasis on words distracting. A good essayist should always remember the reader and it seems that the reader was largely forgotten. I would still recommend this book to anyone interested in the contemporary essay. In spite of its flaws, it is worth reading.
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This item: The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion
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