Meghan Daum has 5 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 4 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.6★ across 36 ratings. The most-rated is The Problem with Everything.
The Problem with Everything
Summary
From “one of the most emotionally exacting, mercilessly candid, deeply funny, and intellectually rigorous writers of our time” (Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild) comes a seminal new audiobook that reaches surprising truths about feminism, the Trump era, and the Resistance movement. You won’t be able to stop thinking and talking about it. In the fall of 2016, New York Times best-selling author Meghan Daum began working on a book about the excesses of contemporary feminism. With Hilary Clinton soon to be elected, she figured even the most fiercely liberal of her friends and readers could take the criticisms in stride. But after the election, she knew she needed to do more, and her nearly completed manuscript went in the trash. What came out in its place is the most sharply observed and all-encompassing work of her career. In this gripping new work, Meghan examines our country’s most intractable problems with clear-eyed honesty instead of exaggerated outrage. With passion, humor, and most importantly, nuance, she tries to make sense of the current landscape - from Donald Trump’s presidency to the #MeToo movement and beyond. In the process, she wades into the waters of identity politics and intersectionality, thinks deeply about the gender wage gap, and tests a theory about the divide between Gen Xers and millennials. This signature work may well be the first to capture the essence of this era in all its nuances and contradictions. No matter where you stand on its issues, this audiobook will strike a chord.
©2019 Meghan Daum (P)2019 Simon & Schuster Audio
Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed
Summary
One of the main topics of cultural conversation during the last decade was the supposed "fertility crisis" and whether modern women could figure out a way to have it all - a successful, demanding career and the required 2.3 children - before their biological clocks stopped ticking. Now, however, conversation has turned to whether it's necessary to have it all (see Anne-Marie Slaughter) or, perhaps more controversial, whether children are really a requirement for a fulfilling life. The idea that some women and men prefer not to have children is often met with sharp criticism and incredulity by the public and mainstream media. In this provocative and controversial collection of essays curated by writer Meghan Daum, 16 acclaimed writers explain why they have chosen to eschew parenthood. Contributors include Lionel Shriver, Sigrid Nunez, Kate Christiensen, Elliott Holt, Geoff Dyer, and Tim Kreider, among others, who will give a unique perspective on the overwhelming cultural pressure of parenthood. Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed makes a thoughtful and passionate case for why parenthood is not the only path in life, taking our parent-centric, kid-fixated, baby-bump-patrolling culture to task in the process. What emerges is a more nuanced, diverse view of what it means to live a full, satisfying life.
©2015 Meghan Daum (P)2015 Tantor
Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House
Summary
A rollicking journey through the wild world of real estate, Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House is the story of "a very imperfect life lived among very imperfect houses" and one woman's obsession with the search for four walls (along with, preferably, a roof not in need of replacing) to call home. In the six houses and many states where Meghan Daum spent her suburban childhood, for the Daum family, "if there was anything that came close to a regular weekend activity it was attending open houses." So it was no surprise that Meghan spent her college career measuring time not by her grades or semesters but by the flights of stairs (12 in all) she dragged her futon up and down as she moved among the dorms and apartments of Vassar College. Post-graduation life in New York City found her haunted by "hidden room" dreams, and fantasies of impossibly inexpensive houses in the middle of Central Park. Two moves later, she was in Lincoln, Nebraska - house heaven: "From my New York perspective, the real estate in Lincoln was so affordable it almost seemed free." But after the purchases of not one but two farmhouses there fell through, and a relationship fizzled, Meghan packed up her 85-pound sheepdog, Rex, threw her (tasteful) 20th-century antiques in storage, and headed for Los Angeles, where she blazed through a series of astoundingly inappropriate sublets - and dates that were doomed from the start: "At 33 years old, the appearance of my house had officially become more important than my own appearance. After decades of worrying about my hair and my thighs, my main concern now was whether a picture was crooked on the wall." Hungry for something that would root her to the earth, tired of "playing president of [her] own personal domestic academy of desire", she embarked at last on the ultimate real-estate adventure: buying a house of her own, on her own. It was 2004, and all too easy to get caught up in the headiness of crowded open houses and "creative" mortgages, bidding wars, and investment properties. Meghan - like the nearly six million Americans riding a wave of perhaps irrational lust who purchased real estate that year - found herself depleting most of her savings to buy a 900-square-foot bungalow with an uninsurable garage that "bore a close resemblance to the ruins of Pompeii" and plumbing that "dated back to the Coolidge administration." From the unexpected joy of finding original 1928 porcelain tiles intact under the bathroom floor linoleum to a frenzied cabinet renovation in anticipation of a gentleman caller; from a desperate attempt to find (and turn off) the water main to the struggles of fitting a new love into a house built for one, Meghan Daum has given us, with delicious wit and a keen eye for the absurd, a pitch-perfect, irresistible story of her lifelong game of house.
©2010 Meghan Daum (P)2011 Audible, Inc.
My Misspent Youth
Summary
An essayist in the tradition of Joan Didion, Meghan Daum is one of the most celebrated nonfiction writers of her generation, widely recognized for her fresh, provocative approach with which she unearths the hidden fault lines in the American landscape. From her well-remembered 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 in Harper's 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.
©2001 Meghan Daum (P)2015 Dreamscape Media, LLC
The Unspeakable
Summary
It's a report tempered by hard times. In "Matricide", Daum unflinchingly describes a parent's death and the uncomfortable emotions it provokes; and in "Diary of a Coma" she relates her own journey to the twilight of the mind. But Daum also operates in a comic register. With perfect precision, she reveals the absurdities of the marriage-industrial complex, of the New Age dating market, and of the peculiar habits of the young and digital. Elsewhere, she writes searchingly about cultural nostalgia, Joni Mitchell, and the alternating heartbreak and liberation of choosing not to have children.
©2014 Megan Daum (P)2014 Dreamscape Media, LLC