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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
A former Gen X journalist finds fodder for her essays in an Internet romance, going broke in New York and hating science fiction fans.
Apr 16, 2001 | Meghan Daum has labored in the salt mines of Generation X journalism, grinding out, as she aptly puts it in the introduction to this collection of her essays, "over-generalizing articles filled with phrases like 'More and more' and 'We're living in an age of ...'" She describes pitching a (never written) "eight thousand word treatise" to a glossy-magazine editor about "the sociopolitical impact of R.E.M. videos on everyone born between 1965 and 1978." In other words, she's written the kind of stories that young readers eat up with a peculiar emotion best characterized as fascinated affront: The thrill in knowing that how someone like you lives is considered an interesting topic for magazine articles is ruined by the fact that someone else has been hired to write them -- and she's getting it all wrong.
Many of the essays in "My Misspent Youth" fall into well-worn genres of magazine writing: a couple of basic features in which Daum drops into a small community (flight attendants, a "polyamorous" household) and attempts to capture their essence in a few thousand words, as well as a My Disastrous Internet Romance essay, an I Can't Afford to Live in New York Anymore confessional and a specimen in that venerable tradition, the I Thought Working in Book Publishing Would Be So Literary but the Days of Maxwell Perkins Are Long Gone, Let Me Tell You lament.
But, as her collection demonstrates, Daum is a cut above the journalistic grunts who usually work this beat. A talented prose stylist, she can penetrate the shiny crust of the genre essay and come up with unexpected ideas (well, not in the case of the publishing lament, but that one's hopeless). She's also wrestling with a perplexity that she sees -- correctly, I think -- as "the condition that I feel most strongly affects the way we as humans go about the business of living our lives: our habit of expressing ourselves through the trappings of particular ideas rather than through the substance of those ideas." That she has zeroed in on this pervasive condition as "the central conflict of my life" and the lives of her cohort is exciting and promising; that she so seldom seems able to transcend it makes the work here often frustrating -- both because we've all been trained to expect a narrative arc that ends in some kind of ratcheting up of the writer's maturity and because it would be nice to see a writer this gifted progress.
In writing her fine variation on the generic Internet romance story, for example, Daum disdains the formulaic conclusion, which would go something like this: I was seduced by the perilous and illusory perfection of my e-mail relationship, but then I realized my error and now celebrate the difficult and "messy" superiority of real life. (Serious personal essayists love the word "messy.") Daum's take isn't so facile: "My interaction with PFSlider [her e-mail beau] was more human than much of what I experienced in the daylight realm of live beings," she writes, suspecting that the Net had given both of them an outlet for the kindness, honesty and consideration that have been exiled from a real life in which vulnerability has become "the worst sin imaginable." She cops to a "monstrous narcissism" in the way she "slurped up" her correspondent's romantic attention, but she doesn't consider their failed courtship to have been the least bit phony. "It wasn't the Internet that contributed to our remote, fragmented lives," she figures. "The problem was life itself."
And when Daum isn't compelled by the length or ambition of a piece to probe for Big Meaning, when the mood is breezy and she lets herself riff on the aesthetic obsessions that are (albeit troublingly) her abiding concern, she's lots of fun. In "Carpet Is Mungers," a diatribe on her surpassing dread of wall-to-wall carpeting, she writes:
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.
Wood floors, it must be said, appear to be the great passion of Daum's life; they figure largely in a couple of stories and crop up incidentally in others as well. Wood floors are an essential component of the kind of Manhattan apartments "where the paint was peeling and the rugs were frayed, places where smart people sat around drinking gin and tonics, having interesting conversations." In her much-talked-about New Yorker essay on fleeing New York City, Daum describes how her dream of living such a life in such an apartment -- a vision that she seems to have derived mainly from Woody Allen movies, another of her touchstones -- drove her into near bankruptcy.
