Meghan Daum has made a career of going where other writers hesitate to tread. From her breakout essay “My Misspent Youth” to her explorations of politics, identity, and cultural conformity, she has cultivated something of a dissident sensibility, with a willingness to offend fashionable opinion and a talent for saying the uncomfortable thing — then pushing the conversation further.
I spoke with Daum about the personal cost of radical honesty, the pitfalls of political conformity, and the art of knowing when you’ve gone too far.
In 1999, you left New York carrying tens of thousands of dollars in debt, including more than $60,000 in loans for your Columbia MFA, and moved to Lincoln, Nebraska. That same year, “My Misspent Youth” ran in The New Yorker and made your name. You’ve never romanticized that period, but did the financial panic give you something as a writer that comfort wouldn’t have?
“My Misspent Youth” ran in The New Yorker in 1999, just a few months after I moved from New York City to Nebraska. It was my second piece in the magazine, and I’d been writing for national publications for several years at that point, so I’m not sure I had any sense that I’d “arrived” or anything like that. But I’d been fascinated by the tics and signifiers of class and status anxiety for as long as I could remember, and it felt like a natural subject for me.
Financial panic absolutely was a driving force behind my professional efforts and ambitions during that time. It definitely lit a fire under me, but it also meant that most of the writing assignments and jobs I took were solely about the money. We can sit here today and talk about what I wrote in The New Yorker, but my bread and butter was writing service pieces and often silly essays for women’s magazines. I did my more serious and prestigious work when I could fit it in, but 80 percent of the time I was just doing anything that would pay me—including answering phones at temp jobs or writing advertising copy.
In “The Dog Exception,” you admit that the “Rainbow Bridge” poem, which you’d normally find mawkish, made you cry after Rex died. Then you take apart why. Is grief for an animal easier to write honestly because the love was uncomplicated, or harder, and why?
As far back as I can remember, animals have brought out my rawest emotions. Any suffering experienced by an animal, even momentary sadness in a children’s book, causes outsized suffering in me.
I’m going through a particularly difficult phase with this right now. I’ve been vocal lately about the street homelessness crisis in Los Angeles and other cities, and what brought me to the issue was the abuse and neglect of animals in many encampments. My hyperawareness of this situation has made it so that I often can’t go about my daily business without fear of seeing an animal in a deeply upsetting situation. And “upsetting” to me can mean anything from obvious abuse to simply seeing a dog tied up in front of a store while the owner presumably runs in for a few minutes. (I am not in a rational place with this!)
As to whether this has to do with grief that is less complicated than grief over human suffering, I honestly don’t know. I mean, on some level, sure. Animals are by definition innocent souls. So are children, of course, but as wrenching as it is to see a child in a bad situation, I can take some solace in the notion that the child won’t stay a child forever. He will (hopefully) grow into an adult with some measure of agency and autonomy. A domesticated animal, on the other hand, is at the mercy of his keepers for life.
That said, I admit to getting so spun out over all of this that I worry about wild animals, too. I worry about coyotes having enough water during the hot months and owls and other birds of prey getting sick from eating poisoned rodents. I flinch and fret when I see hawks being mobbed in flight by crows, though of course the crows are merely protecting their nests and territory. It sounds like the saddest children’s book in the world. Maybe I should write it.
You’ve turned subjects folks usually keep private, like debt, not wanting children, and aging, into cultural criticism. Is there anything you’ve published that you wish you could take back? How do you tell, on the page, when self-exposure is authentic, and when it’s just performance?