My Misspent Youth

The cult classic essay collection from "one of the most emotionally exacting, mercilessly candid, deeply funny... writers of our time" (Cheryl Strayed, The New York Times Book Review). First published in 2001, My Misspent Youth captured a generation's uneasy coming of age as the world made its chaotic way into a new millennium. It also established Meghan Daum as a leading literary voice, widely celebrated for her fresh, provocative approach to the hidden fault lines of America's cultural landscape. From her 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 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.

Meghan Daum

Foreword On the Fringes of the Physical World Publishing and Other Near-Death Experiences My Misspent Youth Carpet Is Mungers Inside the Tube Toy Children According to the Women I'm Fairly Pretty American Shiksa Music Is My Bag Variations on Grief