My Misspent Youth: Essays (Paperback)

by Meghan Daum (Author) "It started in cold weather; fall was drifting away into an intolerable chill..." (more)
Key Phrases: Morning Glory, New York, Music Is My Bag (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Essay lovers can take heart. There's a new voice in the fray, and it belongs to a talented young writer. In this collection of (largely previously published) on-target analyses of American culture, Daum offers the disapproval of youth, leavened with pithy humor and harsh self-appraisal . In each essay, she sustains interest with a good story and pricks the reader's conscience with observations that reverberate personally, whether about the secret desires of Christian women or the stunning ease of accumulating debt while existing unluxuriously in New York City. Publishing veterans will be amused and chagrined to see their profession skewered in "Publishing and Other Near-Death Experiences"; and for a hard take on one's responsibility for mourning, there is the book's best work, "Variation on Grief." Daum's decidedly agnostic outlook sometimes makes for easy moral outs, and time may render her phrasings cute. While her main premise that many Americans live "not actual lives but simulations of lives... via the trinkets on our shelves" leaves room for disagreement, on the whole, readers will enjoy an edgy read. (Mar. 15) Forecast: Daum's pieces have appeared in traditional magazines like the New Yorker, as well as in cutting-edge venues like Nerve, and have earned her a considerable reputation as a sharp Gen-X voice. Review attention and good word-of-mouth should earn this book brisk sales.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
This eclectic collection of essays delves into the corners of contemporary life, ferreting out the eccentric as well as the ordinary. Readers can identify with Daum's disdain for carpeting or her difficulty living within her means on New York's Upper West Side while working at a low-paying publishing job. On a less familiar note is an essay exploring the lifestyle of a group in California who call their communal way of life "polyamory," a brand of free love reminiscent of the 1960s. Not shy about implicating herself, Daum plunges into such thorny issues as an Internet romance and her inability to mourn a friend's death, along with her irritation at his superficial, enabling parents. A regular contributor to National Public Radio, Daum writes essays and articles appearing in major publications including The New Yorker, Harper's, New York Times, GQ, Self, and Vogue. Her work demonstrates honesty and an ability to look perceptively at herself and contemporary life. Daum's is a provocative and refreshing new voice. Recommended for larger public libraries. Nancy R. Ives, SUNY at Geneseo
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 180 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press, Open City Books (March 15, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1890447269
• ISBN-13: 978-1890447267
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #45,460 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Read this book in bits..., March 21, 2002

By	Marcy L. Thompson (Sammamish, WA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars you must buy this book, May 7, 2002

By A Customer

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.

16 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Rising Star, March 27, 2001

By	C. Ebeling "ctlpareader" (PA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.