Meghan Daum on the Power of Personal Essays
Meghan Daum is an award-winning writer, podcaster, columnist and the author of several books. Notably, she is an incisive and unique essayist, known for her trademark honesty and exacting observations. We are delighted to welcome her to the NHE list with her new collection, The Catastrophe Hour – out now in paperback original.
We recently sat down for an interview with Meghan to discuss the collection, her inspiration and her writing process.
You recently said that your new collection, The Catastrophe Hour, is in a sense allowing you to return to your roots. What is it about the act of writing that appeals to you more than podcasting or video, for example?
I’m a writer above all else. I’ve often joked that it was my only skill (my backup career was professional oboist) so it’s a good thing it worked out. I love podcasting, especially in audio-only format, which I think a similar kind of intimacy that you get from a really good personal essay. But the written word will always be my primary medium, even if I’m spending a lot of time doing other things. Paradoxically, the more ‘obsolete’ the written word becomes, the more important, relevant and of course valuable it is. We’re drowning in ‘content’ in the form of podcasts and TikToks and Instagram reels and YouTube shorts and on and on. So sitting down and reading an actual book feels like climbing into a life raft.
Why do you enjoy writing personal essays specifically?
I love personal essays because they combine elements of so many different forms. You’ve got memoir, reporting, cultural criticism, opinion, historical research, sometimes even comedy – all in one piece of writing! I also enjoy taking a subject widely thought of as taboo and exploring it with a level of care and honesty that shows it’s maybe not so taboo after all, or at least doesn’t need to be. The subject can be something dark and serious, such as relief at the death of a loved one. Or it can be something silly and seemingly trivial, like not being a fan of something everyone else loves – for instance, hating the musical Hamilton. (I’m not saying I hate Hamilton.) Mostly, I like the idea of sneaking up on readers and saying something that causes them to be surprised by their own responses.
Who or what inspires you in your writing, and why?
What inspires me are the contradictions and logistical inconsistencies that permeate our days but nonetheless often go unchecked or unremarked upon. When I notice gaps between what people are saying out loud and what they’re almost certainly thinking inside, that’s when I think ‘I should write about that!’. The podcast can sometimes function as a laboratory for written pieces. A free-ranging conversation can help me work through ideas that I’ll later commit to the page. Back in the pre-digital era, writers did that by meeting friends at the bar and hashing out ideas and theories and telling stories. Today, we explore ideas in public on social media or on podcasts or other digital spaces. That can be interesting and entertaining, of course. But it’s also the reason you shouldn’t trust everything you hear on podcasts.
A simpler answer to your question: reading great work by great authors inspires me. Occasionally, I tell my students to read something terrible because then they can say, ‘if this author got published, so can I‘. But that can sometimes backfire. At the end of the day, greatness is the best inspiration.
Whom do you hope your essays will reach? Do you write with an audience in mind?
Whenever I get asked this question about a book, my answer is the same. I hope it reaches anyone and everyone who is interested. I think The Catastrophe Hour will be especially resonant with people who are feeling themselves growing older – let’s say ‘maturing’ – alongside a culture that seems to be aging in reverse, or getting more immature with each passing day.
The essays were written between 2016 and 2024. That means they span the better part of a decade that was arguably the most tumultuous decade in the US since the 1960s. It was a period bookended by the elections of an unprecedentedly polarising and even deranging president and it also took us through the #MeToo era, the racial reckonings ingited by the death of George Floyd, the COVID pandemic, the new gender movement, and a wide-scale collapse of public trust in educational, medical, cultural and political institutions. It was, as the kids say, a lot. All the while, news media algorithms continued to distort our information diets and social media algorithms found new ways to target our dopamine receptors and get us hooked on useless if not downright poisonous ‘content’.
For my part, while all of this was happening in the outside world, my private world was experiencing its own upheavals. I went through a divorce, lost my father (and a beloved dog), wrestled with changes to my professional landscape, and moved around the country in a somewhat chaotic fashion. Above all, I went from, as Victor Hugo put it, the ‘old age of youth’ (my 40s) into the ‘youth of old age’ (my 50s). I found myself thinking a lot about death, though not necessarily in a negative way. I also couldn’t shake my ongoing obsession with real estate, which I’d published an entire book about more than a decade earlier, called Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived In That House. But instead of thinking about living in my ideal house, I was now also thinking about dying in that house. So intense was this obsession with the perfect home that I actually spent several years trying to build a modest dream house on a hillside in Los Angeles. I finally had to admit defeat and give up the project, at great financial loss and significant emotional distress. This is the subject of the title essay.
The word ‘catastrophe’ is used rather hyperbolically in this case. But in an irony to end all ironies, I experienced an actual housing catastrophe in January of this year when the house I was living in burned down in the Los Angeles wildfires and I lost every single one of my possessions. The book was already completed and printed by then, but several people saw the title and thought I’d already managed to write and publish an entire book about the fires. I wish I could write that fast. We’ll have to wait for the next book. Too bad this title is already taken!
About Meghan Daum
Meghan Daum is an award-winning writer, podcaster and columnist. She is the author of five books, including The Problem With Everything: My Journey Through the New Culture Wars and The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion, which won the 2015 Pen Centre USA Award for creative non-fiction. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and has written for numerous magazines, including the New Yorker, The New York Times magazine and the Atlantic, as well as being a Los Angeles Times opinion columnist for more than a decade.
In 2020, Meghan launched a weekly interview podcast, The Unspeakable, and in 2022 she founded The Unspeakeasy, a multi-tiered platform devoted to fostering free speech and viewpoint diversity among women. She also runs a Substack.
Back to blog