Constant chatter of nebulous vibe shifts and woke/anti-woke battles has made it nearly impossible to find rational voices in the cacophonous take economy. It’s dispiriting to watch a once respected and sane commentator devolve into an annoying and perpetually aggrieved social media screecher. But that seems to be the default position of most writers these days, no matter the political orientation. Too many sensible writers to name have been driven mad in the past decade, ushering in the insufferable cultural era we find ourselves in.
Like many people, I’m tired of the screaming and the histrionics, which is why Meghan Daum’s latest essay collection, The Catastrophe Hour, was such a pleasure to read. Daum, an acclaimed essayist and cultural critic who’s been around since the 1990s and witnessed countless cultural cycles, is too wise to fall into the traps many of her contemporaries willingly step into. Daum lays it out plainly in the introduction to the collection, which contains essays written between 2017 and 2024: “They were inspired not by news headlines or social media dustups but by the free-floating anxiety that underscores and perpetuates all of that. They are my attempt to grab some emotional abstractions out of thin air and examine them until they can start to make sense. They’re about the pleasures of staring out the window or even staring at the wall.” Thank goodness — a book about a writer’s life and not her political obsessions. In a social media landscape in which writers have become aphorism machines, spewing politically-laden life advice (keep resisting!) Daum is the rare contemporary writer who simply tells the truth in the unvarnished manner that inevitably hits the hardest. No hiding, here, behind ideology or politics or passing fads that distract from the stuff of life.
The essays in The Catastrophe Hour examine Daum’s personal and professional life, often simultaneously, as hers has been a life directed by the ups and downs of her writing career. Daum is at her best when she’s looking back wistfully and honestly, coming to terms with the decisions that have landed her in her various current predicaments. In “Same Life, Higher Rent,” Daum documents her return to New York City after leaving Los Angeles post-divorce. “It is 1997. It is 2017. It doesn’t matter. It is both. In twenty years, my life has come full circle, 360 degrees for real,” Daum writes. Daum now works on a “MacBook Air laptop” instead of a “Quadra 650,” and the “modem is wireless rather than dial-up,” but not much has changed. But the beauty of Daum’s work lies in the realization that even though the landscape remains unchanged, her understanding of it is now clear. Daum might be in a perpetual cycle, but she’s a totally different person — one who understands that “the life I was living in my twenties, a life that I was certain was a temporary condition, was, in fact, the only one for me.”
The theme of accepting one’s station in life predominates in the book, as Daum, now middle-aged, assesses what’s gone wrong and what she’s gotten right. There’s no self-pity, only wisdom, as evidenced when Daum writes of realizing her “situational set point, the version of myself that inevitably swings back into the foreground even if I’ve managed to pretend to be another kind of person for a period of time.” In “A Handsome Woman,” Daum, whose “operating assumption has always been that my face is quirky but reliably cute, occasionally even pretty,” writes candidly and with charming humor of her middle-aged struggles with her looks. “For the better part of fifty years, I didn’t worry about my face. In fact, I enjoyed it.” Daum is especially hyperaware of her face now that the podcast she co-hosts is on YouTube, and she laments that “we’ve arrived at a moment in which artists and thinkers of all ages are subject to appraisals not just of their ideas but of their physical selves, often poorly lit and awkwardly framed.” The essay is a perfect encapsulation of what Daum does best and why she’s one of our most important essayists: charmingly mining the personal in a manner that exposes societal problems without devolving into the overly political.
Daum was there for the personal essay boom and the 1990s magazine peak, during which writers were paid big bucks, and now she’s surviving during the content creation era. She’s seen it all and kept writing. Several essays chart the shifts of the writing life over the course of the past 30 years. Like most professional writers, Daum is now a content creator, “thinking of new ways to get attention and knocking on doors in hopes that they’ll get in.” What’s remarkable and a testament to Daum’s talent and character is that she doesn’t go for the cheap takes or the annoyingly faux-provocative prose like so many lesser writers. Young writers, especially, should take note of Daum’s tone in The Catastrophe Hours, which is confident and assured without being social-media-inflected. It’s a pleasure to read a book in which the writer doesn’t play to an audience groomed on social media hysterics and X threads.
ON HONOR LEVY AND THE LITERARY GAME
The longest piece in the book, “Femcel Cope (A Case Against Early Marriage),” shows Daum at her finest, tackling problematic dating discourse while diving into her own relationship history. It’s a powerful essay in which Daum analyzes the dating choices she made and didn’t make — a clear, concise, and moving assessment of a romantic life. Dating discourse leans toward the toxic and incendiary, writers playing to the enraged hyperonline crowd, but Daum does the far more difficult task of real self-assessment. After all, this is a personal essay collection in which the personal takes precedence over everything. It ends with Daum writing that she is “in the right life. How did I get so lucky?” It’s hopeful and truthful, a rare combination in a time of online outrage and garbage takes.
The Catastrophe Hour is proof that writers and readers can choose to engage with their lives in a manner that is radically disengaged with the pointless noise of the day. You can look inward. You can look at the wall or out the window and see what’s really going on. It might be a catastrophe. But as Daum so beautifully makes clear, it’s your catastrophe.
Alex Perez is a fiction writer and cultural critic from Miami. Follow him on X: @Perez_Writes.
