My Misspent Youth
I just had a lot of fun with My Misspent Youth by Meghan Daum. It’s a collection of essays collected over a few years by Daum, many of which were published in periodicals. I always love the voice of a youthful writer; as Daum spins her assured, beautiful prose the words feel as though they could just as easily be about me. The first story, “On the Fringes of the Physical World,” held that magic as Daum described an online relationship nurtured by curiosity and killed by reality.
The essay from which the book is titled is a coming of age story but the coming of age that makes sense today: graduating from college, real work, graduate school, debt and finally Nebraska. That's right, Nebraska. A cheap, unpretentious, boring, and safe place to lick wounds and pay off debts.
Daum’s strength is her honesty. This often elicits some contradictions from piece to piece; in “My Misspent Youth” she owns up to an unhealthy fascination in an untenable New York lifestyle but a while later in “Carpet is Mungers” she displays an elitist tone towards home carpeting:
“Carpet is the road you congratulate yourself for never having taken. Carpet is the woman in the supermarket whom you are glad not to be. Carpet is the house who bought the oddly named and aggressively bland-tasting Savannahs when you sold Girl Scout cookies. Carpet is the job you held immediately after graduation, before you realized that a career in marketing posed a severe threat to your emotional health ... It's the efficiency apartment you'll be forced to move into if the business fails, the marriage collapses, the checks stop coming in.”
I found myself wincing the further I went, realizing that in many ways Daum would be difficult to like as a person. Her high brow attitude (I hate carpet, I like Jewish intellectuals, I’m an effortlessly good musician) is trying the further you get into the book. But I found in myself a strange response to her confessions; her honesty opened me up. For example, I have my own peculiar aversions in home arrangement. Seeing a John Grisham1 novel on a bookshelf or John Tesh CD causes the same sort of reaction in me that a carpeted dwelling would produce for Daum. We all have these particulars, don’t we?
"But I'm capable of being extremely shallow, far more superficial than I'm often given credit for."
Sometimes a person can be too consistent. When this is the case the air is full of pretense and lack of authenticity. Getting to know a person well is seeing contradictions. It’s the person being unafraid to show you who they are completely: depths and shallows. This is where Daum succeeds. Even though I suspect it was padded, what I liked most was getting to know her.
You can read a professional review on Salon.
1K called me on this; I actually have not read a Grisham book. But the Salon Reader's Guide confirmed every suspicion I had.
10:10:25 PM 
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