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    My Misspent Youth: Essays
    My Misspent Youth: Essays
    My Misspent Youth: Essays
    Ebook162 pages2 hours

    My Misspent Youth: Essays

    By Meghan Daum

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    My Misspent Youth is an incisive collection that marked the start of a new millennium and became a cult classic, from the editor of Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed and the author of The Unspeakable

    An essayist in the tradition of Joan Didion, Meghan Daum is one of the most celebrated nonfiction writers of her generation, widely recognized for her fresh, provocative approach with which she unearths the hidden fault lines in the American landscape.

    From her well remembered New Yorker essays about the financial demands of big-city ambition and the ethereal, strangely old-fashioned allure of cyber-relationships to her dazzlingly hilarious riff in Harper's about musical passions that give way to middle-brow paraphernalia, Daum delves into the center of things while closely examining the detritus that spills out along the way. With precision and well-balanced irony, Daum implicates herself as readily as she does the targets that fascinate and horrify her.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateDec 23, 2014
    ISBN9781250067692
    My Misspent Youth: Essays
    Author

    Meghan Daum

    Meghan Daum is the author of six books including The Problem with Everything and The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion, which won the 2015 PEN Center USA Literary Award for creative nonfiction. Her other books include the essay collection My Misspent Youth, and the New York Times bestseller Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids, which she edited. From 2005 to 2016, Daum was an opinion columnist for the Los Angeles Times. She has contributed to numerous magazines, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, and Vogue. A recipient of a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, she is on the adjunct faculty in the MFA Writing Program at Columbia University School of the Arts. She is also the creator and host of the weekly interview podcast, The Unspeakable. 

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    Reviews for My Misspent Youth

    3.5/5

    71 ratings5 reviews

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    • 2/5
      If you read a favorite author deeply enough, and if she's written enough books, you will eventually hit a dud. These are dated essays which don't hang together well. I already know about what Daum is trying to share here, through her other, better books and essay collections.
    • 5/5
      this book is so good, i just cant stop reading it. totally recommendable for all ages , interesting, entertaining, informative and relatable. the writings are true to the core.
    • 2/5
      There are moments of great insight and attentiveness throughout, and some wonderful turns of phrase, but the voice is young and a bit angry and a bit muddled. I can't decide whether "American Shiksa" is brilliant or a bit offensive. But her later collection of essays, the Unthinkable, is sublime, which actually makes this kind of heartening to read -- see the difference that thirteen years makes.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      3 stars ONLY because her writing style is fantastic. I love how she analyzes her life and how she got to where she is, but some of these essays just irked the shit out of me. She talks of writing things that are true and not true, so I'm hoping that more than a few of the details are false, written just for the thought process and shock value of those who staunchly disagree with her alleged thoughts.
    • 4/5
      Summary: Percy Jackson, son of Poseidon, and his friends travel to Maine to pick up some new half-bloods and bring them back to camp, but things go terribly awry: the monster stalking the half-bloods proves more difficult than expected, even with the help of the goddess Artemis and her Huntresses. Percy is distraught when Annabeth falls, seemingly to her death, but when they return to camp, the heroes are in for bigger problems. Artemis has since gone missing, after setting out on the trail of the most dangerous monster of them all. A quest is organized to rescue her, and Percy tags along... although his real reason is less about the goddess and more about his dreams of Annabeth, still alive and in terrible danger.Review: I'm afraid that my reviews for these books are in danger of becoming repetitive, but the truth of the matter is that the books themselves continue to be just as good as the first: exciting mid-grade action adventure, funny on a number of levels, clever worldbuilding, fun use of Greek mythology, and a fun read all around. The Titan's Curse draws mostly on parts of the Hercules myth, but even before I figured that out, I knew who the the titular Titan was, and so the big reveal at the end was less surprising than it might have been. (I also did put down this book in the middle, break out my D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths, and re-read the Hercules section, so I had a fairly good idea of what was coming in general, although it was fun as always to see how Riordan translated it into the modern world.) One thing I did notice that separated this book from the previous ones was that Percy really is starting to grow up, which has some interesting consequences for his relationships with both gods and mortals (and girls in particular), and Riordan handles the character development subtly and realistically. 4 out of 5 stars.Recommendation: From a grown-up's perspective, these books are total brain candy, but they're at least really well done brain candy. Don't start on book 3, but the series is definitely recommended for anyone looking for a fun read with a mythological flair.

    Book preview

    My Misspent Youth - Meghan Daum

    ON THE FRINGES OF THE PHYSICAL WORLD

    It started in cold weather; fall was drifting away into an intolerable chill. I was on the tail end of twenty-six, living in New York City, and trying to support myself as a writer. One morning I logged on to my America Online account to find a message under the heading is this the real meghan daum? It came from someone with the screen name PFSlider. The body of the message consisted of five sentences, written entirely in lowercase letters, of perfectly turned flattery, something about PFSlider’s admiration of some newspaper and magazine articles I had published over the last year and a half, something else about his resulting infatuation with me, and something about his being a sportswriter in California.

    I was charmed for a moment or so, engaged for the thirty seconds that it took me to read the message and fashion a reply. Though it felt strange to be in the position of confirming that I was indeed the real meghan daum, I managed to say, Yes, it’s me. Thank you for writing. I clicked the Send Now icon and shot my words into the void, where I forgot about PFSlider until the next day when I received another message, this one entitled eureka. wow, it is you, he wrote, still in lowercase. He chronicled the various conditions under which he’d read my few and far between articles: a boardwalk in Laguna Beach, the spring training pressroom for the baseball team he covered for a Los Angeles newspaper.

    He confessed to having a crazy crush on me. He referred to me as princess daum. He said he wanted to propose marriage or at least have lunch with me during one of his two annual trips to New York. He managed to do all of this without sounding like a schmuck. As I read the note, I smiled the kind of smile one tries to suppress, the kind of smile that arises during a sappy movie one never even admits to seeing. The letter was outrageous and endearingly pathetic, possibly the practical joke of a friend trying to rouse me out of a temporary writer’s block. But the kindness pouring forth from my computer screen was unprecedented and bizarrely exhilarating. I logged off and thought about it for a few hours before writing back to express how flattered and touched—this was probably the first time I had ever used the word touched in earnest—I was by his message.

    I had received e-mail messages from strangers before, most of them kind and friendly and courteous—all of those qualities that generally get checked with the coats at the cocktail parties that comprise what the information age has now forced us to call the three-dimensional world. I am always warmed by an unsolicited gesture of admiration or encouragement, amazed that anyone would bother, shocked that communication from a stranger could be fueled by anything other than an attempt to get a job or make what the professional world has come to call a connection.

    I am not what most people would call a computer person. I have utterly no interest in chat rooms, news groups, or most Web sites. I derive a palpable thrill from sticking an actual letter in the U.S. mail. But e-mail, though at that time I generally only sent and received a few messages a week, proves a useful forum for my particular communication anxieties. I have a constant, low-grade fear of the telephone. I often call people with the intention of getting their answering machines. There is something about the live voice that has become startling, unnervingly organic, as volatile as incendiary talk radio. PFSlider and I tossed a few innocuous, smart-assed notes back and forth over the week following his first message. His name was Pete. He was twenty-nine and single. I revealed very little about myself, relying instead on the ironic commentary and forced witticisms that are the conceit of most e-mail messages. But I quickly developed an oblique affection for PFSlider. I was excited when there was a message from him, mildly depressed when there wasn’t. After a few weeks, he gave me his phone number. I did not give him mine but he looked me up anyway and called me one Friday night. I was home. I picked up the phone. His voice was jarring yet not unpleasant. He held up more than his end of the conversation for an hour, and when he asked permission to call me again, I accepted as though we were in a previous

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