August 25, 2014
Daum’s second essay collection is an engaging but uneven follow-up to her acclaimed 2001 debut, My Misspent Youth. “What I was in it for, what I was about, was the fieldwork aspect,” she writes in “The Best Possible Experience,” a lighthearted essay about dating and marriage. Daum brings this anthropological lens to all of her essays, often weaving social critique into personal narrative. In “Difference Maker,” she describes volunteering with the juvenile court system, leading to the revelation that “children who wind up in foster aren’t just in a different neighborhood. They inhabit a world so dark it may as well exist outside of our solar system.” Daum is a smart and candid writer, but the collection’s title promises a kind of deviance that she never quite delivers. “The Joni Mitchell Problem” details her embarrassing love for Joni Mitchell and a dinner they had together; “Honorary Dyke” examines the author’s skin-deep identification with lesbian culture; and “The Dog Exception” makes one wonder whether the world needs any more writing about pets. But in “Matricide,” a frank and affecting account of her mother’s death, Daum proves that she can wrestle with ghosts. “In the history of the world, a whole story has never been told,” she writes. But that shouldn’t stop her from trying.
February 2, 2015
Los Angeles Times columnist Daum articulates “the spin we put on our lives” through a genuine, unaffected narration of her well-written essay collection. The audio edition is bookended with meditations on mortality: it opens with “Matricide,” the story of her problematic relationship with her mother and her mother’s death, and closes with “Diary of a Coma,” about Daum’s own very close brush with death. In between, she speaks eloquently about her choice not to have children, lesbianism, Joni Mitchell, Nora Ephron, foster care advocacy, dogs, and food. Daum writes with intelligence and wit, and she reads with the confidence of someone who has reflected at length on her life and her choices, and then mined that material for this collection
of “unspeakable thoughts.” She employs an unsentimental, often inflectionless tone, most notably during “Matricide.” The exception to this delivery style is
in her essay on dogs, where she is less guarded and more relaxed, loving, and poetic, breaking listeners’ hearts with the pain of losing her beloved dog, Rex. Daum is a daring and sometimes provocative writer; her voice is mellow and
conversational, and she possesses the
storyteller’s ability to draw listeners in with her pleasing rhythm and relatable experiences. A Farrar, Straus and Giroux hardcover.