Notable Online: 7/19–7/25
Literary events taking place virtually this week!
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Posts Tagged: Meghan Daum
Notable Los Angeles: 10/28–11/3
Literary events in and around L.A. this week!
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Both the Wound and the Healing: Talking with Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman
Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman discusses her debut memoir, SOUNDS LIKE TITANIC.
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Notable NYC: 7/21–7/27
Literary events in and around New York City this week!
...moreNotable NYC: 2/3–2/9
Literary events and readings in and around New York City this week!
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Come for Me, Katie Roiphe
Backlash isn’t new to our Internet culture, but with Twitter and hot takes it does come for us a little faster.
...moreNotable NYC: 8/5–8/11
Saturday 8/5: Elizabeth Jaikaran talks with Priya Arora about Trauma: A Collection of Short Stories. Powerhouse Archway, 6 p.m., free. Monday 8/7: Jill Eisenstadt reads Swell. Brooklyn Bridge Park, 7 p.m., free.
...moreThe Other Half
By forcing blue-state liberal types to reckon with a demographic they had long dismissed as a punch line—low-income, uneducated whites in economically depleted regions—he [Donald Trump] awakened them to the fact that the groovy progressive social values they had assumed were a national fait accompli were actually only half the story. At the New York Times, […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Meghan Daum and Elliott Holt
Meghan Daum, the anthology’s editor, and Elliott Holt, who contributed its penultimate essay, discuss Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed.
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Paul Lisicky
The Rumpus Book Club talks with Paul Lisicky about his new book The Narrow Door>/em>, how much of your story you own, and the importance of reading your own work aloud.
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The Last Book I Loved: Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living In New York
But when my loneliness feels as vast—and capable of drowning me—as the sea, this book about self-destruction comforts me more than any self-help.
...moreThe Unromantic Realities of Book Publishing
Books make being an editorial assistant seem pretty glamorous. Meghan Daum discusses the unromantic realities of being an editorial assistant in book publishing, in an excerpt from the new reprint of her essay collection My Misspent Youth: To the dewy eye of the editorial assistant, there is something about this mythos — the stiff patent […]
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
If you’re a woman over the age of 25, you are familiar with the pressure to procreate. The parental inquiries of when you’ll be settling down, when you’ll give them grandkids. The friends on Facebook popping out babies like clockwork. And if you’re married, the judgment-loaded questions from anyone you’ve barely met: Do you have […]
...moreA Life in Non-Fiction
I’ve always been a late bloomer in some ways, and extremely precocious in other ways. When I was twenty I was living in New York and working a job and could barely bother to be a college student and had my own apartment, but I couldn’t possibly get married before I was thirty-nine. Over at […]
...moreChildless Spinsters
Not getting married and not having children are still controversial decisions for women. Over at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Minda Honey shares her own experience, and reviews three recent books on the subject by Sara Eckel, Meghan Daum, and Kate Bolick.
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Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed edited by Meghan Daum
Daum’s collection is at its best when it’s being the most transparent and unapologetic.
...moreNever Change
The LA Review of Books talks with Meghan Daum about her wildly successful new essay collection, The Unspeakable, catharsis, and redemption (or the lack thereof): I think what tends to be truly unspeakable in our current culture is not when someone is honest about her mistakes or struggles, but rather when she fails to learn […]
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The Hole in the Fence at the End of N 7th
I only know one parlor game and it is looking around at young people, feeling deeply in-the-know about their being in endless, pointless distress over insufficiently expressing themselves.
...moreDaum-isms
Just to throw out a few other Daum-isms—here’s her description of Anthropologie: “A twirling motion in the form of an international brand”. Of Los Angeles: “a place where wildness and domestication are forever running into each other.” Of Nicole Kidman: “a walking Vermeer.” She’s pithy like a newspaper columnist needs to be, but she doesn’t […]
...moreLydia Kiesling Is Not Done Reading
Lydia Kiesling discovered Meghan Daum after reading the writer’s profile of Lena Dunham in a recent issue of the New York Times Magazine. As she chronicles in Salon, she didn’t stop there.
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Good Riddance to the Goodbye-to-New-York Essay
Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to All That” has spawned a new literary genre: the personal screed about loving (or leaving) New York City.
...moreHonest to a Fault
You probably knew that Lena Dunham wrote a memoir (if you didn’t, she has), but she’d love to remind you why she’s qualified. Meghan Daum elaborates for the New York Times Magazine: To suggest that Dunham is too young, too privileged, too entitled, too narcissistic, neurotic and provincial (in that rarefied Manhattan-raised way) to be dispensing advice to […]
...moreOn Being A “Vile, Loathsome, Despicable Pig”
Via Verge‘s best-of-2012 list, here’s an essay by Meghan Daum about the lakes of vitriol that make up so many online comments sections. She compares the unfavorable reaction to a somewhat naïve piece she wrote about safe sex in the ’90s to the daily attacks she now receives on her “looks, marital or reproductive status, and […]
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