Over five first-rate essay collections and one very good, if underrated, novel, Meghan Daum has written a cohesive, almost novelistic narrative about a character named Meghan Daum. Her first book, My Misspent Youth, from 2001 (which, full disclosure, I published at Open City Books), measured the author’s dream of a Persian throw on a hardwood floor against the cost of a single martini in a New York City bar.
The up-and-coming urbanite exiles herself, in the name of fiscal sanity, to a farm “in a square state” (her novel, The Quality of Life Report, 2004, in which the Daum-like protagonist is named Lucinda Trout). She becomes a respectably married and employed columnist at the Los Angeles Times whose main peccadillo is an obsession with real estate (Life Would Be Perfect if I Lived in That House, 2010).
