For One Essayist, 'The Unspeakable' Isn't Off-Limits

Transcript

ARUN RATH, HOST:

The personal essay is a tricky thing. These days, it feels like everyone is journaling their lives through blogs, Facebook, Tumblr, whatever. But quality writing with real insight about the human condition - much harder to find.

Maybe that's why writer Meghan Daum is so celebrated. In an era of Internet exhibitionism, her explorations of why we do what we do still managed to shock. Meghan Daum's new book of essays is called "The Unspeakable," and she joins me here at NPR West. Meghan, welcome to the show.

MEGHAN DAUM: Thanks for having me.

RATH: So I kind of felt like this is self-absorbed, but this book was sort of directed right at me, because we were both born in 1970 and you write very specifically about the peculiarity of this time in your life. You're not young anymore. You're not exactly old. There's something kind of unnerving about that.

DAUM: Yeah, I feel it hasn't been defined. I guess technically we're middle-aged. If you're in your mid-40s, you're middle-aged. But that just doesn't sound right.

RATH: I didn't want to say that.

DAUM: Because people - people in their sixth. I know, the audience - you know, people are just turning off their radios. Middle-aged people - people on their 60s are middle-aged, right? So I don't think we're quite there. It's almost like we're - are we in the twilight of youth? That sounds almost worse. That sounds not good.

RATH: And it's not just that this is an awkward age to be, but our generation - Generation X, for lack of a better term - that's the term that stuck. You feel like we kind of - we arrived at kind of an awkward time, too.

DAUM: Awkward, but also interesting. Here's the thing. We are actually, in my view, our sensibilities are more closely aligned with the boomers than the millennials, a lot having to do with technology. We remember a time - pre-digital era. We were sentient beings during that time. We were not using the Internet in junior high school. And we had junior high school and not middle school.

RATH: And there's this moment that you referred to in the book that kind of draws this into focus. It's an off-camera moment from the "Today Show" in 1994. And I actually want to play this for people. We'll hear Bryant Gumbel, Katie Couric and Elizabeth Vargas.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "TODAY SHOW")

KATIE COURIC: Oh, that's right.

BRYANT GUMBEL: A little mark with the A and then the ring around it.

ELIZABETH VARGAS: At.

GUMBEL: See, that's what I said. Katie said she thought it was about.

COURIC: Yeah.

VARGAS: Oh.

GUMBEL: But I'd never heard it - I'd never heard it said.

COURIC: Around.

GUMBEL: I'd always seen the mark, but never heard it said. And then it sounded stupid when I said it - violence@NBC. There is is - violence@NBC.GE.com. I mean...

COURIC: Well, Allison (ph) should know. What is...

GUMBEL: What is Internet, anyway?

RATH: What is Internet anyway - Bryant Gumbel's pressing question.

DAUM: He might still be asking that question - who knows? My only regret is that we couldn't see their hairstyles and their clothing in this radio clip. Yeah, it's pretty amazing.

RATH: You imagine in this book dialogues between your younger and older selves. I think this is something that a lot of people do. And I was hoping you could read a section for us. This is - you're imagining one of these conversations, but this is what your older self would hold back.

DAUM: Yes. OK. (Reading) Here's what older self will not have the heart to say. Some of the music you are now listening to, the CDs you play while you stare out the window and think about the 5 million different ways your life might go, will be unbearable to listen to in 20 years. They will be unbearable not because they will sound dated and trite, but because they will sound like the lining of your soul. They will take you straight back to the place you were in when you felt that anything could happen at any time, that your life was a huge room with a thousand doors, that your future was not only infinite, but also elastic.

They will be unbearable because they will remind you that at least half of the things you once planned for your future are now in the past and others got reabsorbed into your imagination before you could even think about acting on them. It will be as though you never thought of them in the first place, as if they were never meant to be anything more than passing thoughts you had while playing your stereo at night.

RATH: There's this tension there that I feel - it kind of runs through the whole book. Tell me if I'm wrong, but I feel like you have a discomfort with sentimentality.

DAUM: You think?

RATH: But it's also inescapable the same time.

DAUM: Yeah, I started off thinking that really what linked these essays was sentimentality. You know, I wrote a couple inspired by experiences that I had had personally over the last couple of years. And then I started to think about what was the theme. And the theme had to do with the way that our culture is really wedded to certain ideas about taking meaning from experiences that might not necessarily be there - the idea that you have to be redeemed after some sort of traumatic event or you have to learn a lesson or you have to come out a better person from a crisis.

RATH: Like when you're writing about your mother's death, you have this awareness of there's like this script that you are supposed to be following at the same time that you're going through this emotionally.

DAUM: Yeah, you know, I had - I had a couple of years where my mother, in about an 18-month period - my mother got sick and died. And then I had a freak illness less than a year later and almost died myself. And I found, in both of those situations, that there was this expectation to have a kind of transformative experience. You know, we expect things of the dying that are really unreasonable.

RATH: When you had your own brush with death, people kind of came to you almost with their burdens afterwards of wanting to have like some sense of a turnaround of a conversation with Jesus or something that you would come out of it with.

DAUM: Yeah, and it's - I think they were really scared and they were really - when I started to get better, friends were saying, oh, you know, we were praying, or we were thing about this in a certain way. And we want to know what you think about it now. We want to know is there some secret out there. And all I could really say was, you know, not really. Like, I'll probably go back to my shallow, whiny ways. And that's actually recovery, though, right?

RATH: Right.

DAUM: That actually is a success, I think - staying the same person rather than becoming a different person, which is what they wanted. It was as if they couldn't believe that I had actually recovered unless I was transformed in some way.

RATH: Meghan Daum's new book of essays is called "The Unspeakable." Meghan, it's been a pleasure speaking with you. Thank you.

DAUM: Thanks so much. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.