Not Getting with the Program: An Interview with Meghan Daum

PHOTOGRAPH BY LAURA KLEINHENZ

In “Difference Maker,” your piece in this week’s issue, you write about your volunteer work with young people—first as a Big Sister and, more recently, as a foster-child advocate—while also describing your reluctance to have a child of your own. We’re more likely to hear about women who wanted to have children but were unable to than about women who are childless by choice. Was this something that you were aware of as you were writing the essay?

It’s definitely something I’m aware of in my day-to-day existence, but I didn’t see the essay as having a particularly overt message in that regard. I just wanted to tell the story of this period in my life when I was working closely with “Matthew” (as I mention in the essay, I don’t use any of the kids’ real names) while also dealing with these issues in my marriage. I’ve always been pretty clear about not wanting children, though, as I write in the essay, it’s easy (and, I would argue, healthy) to question yourself when you’re in a committed partnership with someone who’s open to having them. One reason I feel it’s important to talk about choosing not to have kids (as opposed to not being able to have them when you want them, which is a whole other story) is that, so often, the discussion is reduced to glib remarks or punch lines like “I’d rather have expensive shoes!” or “Instead of having kids, I bought a Porsche!” That stuff drives me crazy. First of all, it diminishes the serious thought that so many people who make this choice put into their decision. Secondly, it perpetuates the “selfish” chestnut by assuming that people who opt out of parenthood are therefore choosing to live self-absorbed, materialistic lives. As a mentor and an advocate, I’ve seen no end to the ways that childless people can contribute to the lives and well-being of kids—and adults, for that matter. Those stereotypes are tiresome and counterproductive.

I’d also point out that I’d be hard-pressed to find someone who wanted kids but then decided not to have them because they wanted shoes or a Porsche instead. It’s a preposterous notion. Yet we often hear rhetoric suggesting as much. There’s such a stigma in saying “Hey, this isn’t for me” that some people would rather claim to be shallow narcissists rather than just saying the truth.

When you started your volunteer work with these young people, did you imagine that you would write about it one day? Did you have any concerns about doing so?

I had no specific plans to write about it. And, when I began volunteering as a foster-child advocate, there might have been a few raised eyebrows around the courthouse because I’m known as a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, a paper that covers the child-welfare system quite assiduously (and not always favorably). But my column covers culture and social politics; I rarely if ever write about issues related to child welfare. Eventually, the confluence of my work with these children—especially Matthew—and my personal journey around the parenthood issue became so intense that I couldn’t help but consider writing about it in the form of a long essay that had nothing to do with the column. But I knew I could only do so if the kids’ identities were completely protected. That’s why, as much as I’d love to be able to talk about the specifics of Matthew’s case, I cannot and never will. The essay is set up so that it talks about these kids in a very glancing, general way. And, while the stories are true, they’re the kinds of stories you could tell about lots of kids in these sorts of situations. There is nothing I’ve written about Matthew that could identify him in any way. He can tell his whole story himself someday if he chooses to, and I would love it if he did. But it’s not mine to tell. (So, alas, I told a story about my marriage!)

The essay appears, in a slightly different form, in your new collection, “The Unspeakable,” which will be published in November. The pieces range from an account of your mother’s death from gallbladder cancer to your identification with lesbians (while realizing that you remain irredeemably heterosexual) to your deep love for your dog and your experience with a life-threatening illness. When do you know you have the material for an essay? What’s it like to return to those moments in your life?

I never sit down to write anything personal unless I know the subject is going to go beyond my own experience and address something larger and more universal. To me, having “material” for an essay means not only having something to write about but also having something interesting and original to say about whatever that might be. I’ve learned over the years that being interested in a particular subject or story does not guarantee you’ll have anything worthwhile to say about it. I can’t tell you how often I’ll sit down to write a column about something that seems incredibly compelling to me, only to realize that I don’t actually have anything new to add and therefore need to find another topic. All of the pieces in the book came out of a process of chewing on the subject matter until I felt confident that I’d be able to work out some kind of unexpected twist or turn in the narrative. I wasn’t going to just write about my mother dying or my dog dying or me getting sick and almost dying. I wanted to offer readers some fresh or provocative interpretations of those events. That’s why those essays aren’t really about death or illness as much as they’re about the scripts we’re told we’re supposed to follow around such circumstances. Ultimately, the book is about not being able to get with the program. It’s about the cognitive and emotional dissonance that arises when we don’t have “appropriate” emotions and reactions—for instance, when we fear that we don’t love our parents enough or we wonder if we love our pets too much or we suspect we’re not going to become a better person when we’re given a second chance at life.

The essay “Honorary Dyke” opens, “There was a period in my life, roughly between the ages of thirty-two and thirty-five, when pretty much anyone who saw me would assume I was a lesbian.” The essay reaches from your twenties to your forties, and toward the end of the essay, you deem yourself “a particular kind of butch you find in straight women,” which you name “a phantom butch.” Do you think you could have made this kind of assessment when you were younger?

Actually, yes. The phenomenon of straight women being attracted to lesbian culture is something I’ve been kicking around in my mind for at least twenty years. I might not have come up with the “phantom butch” trope back then (though I did read Terry Castle’s “The Apparitional Lesbian” when it came out in 1993, so who knows?) but I knew I’d eventually try to tackle it in a piece of writing. I just never really found my way into it until now. I knew the essay could only work if it functioned on some level like an extended humor riff. It needed to signal clearly to the reader that it wasn’t meant to be taken literally on every level, that it was designed as a rather ridiculous and over-the-top kind of thing. (My use of the word “dyke” being Exhibit A.) That said, I did want to make some serious points about the circumscribed nature of femininity in today’s culture. I wanted to talk about the ways in which lesbian culture can sometimes confer a sensibility and an aesthetic that can be incredibly liberating for straight women, especially in the hyper-girly, pornified zeitgeist that is so prominent today. I also wanted to talk about my love for and fascination with the Title Nine sportswear catalogue. It’s like a choose-your-own-adventure book where you can also order running tights.

You lived on the East Coast for most of your childhood and early adulthood, but, following a stop in the Great Plains, you’ve been in Los Angeles for more than a decade. It forms the backdrop to several of these essays, and you examine it more closely in “Invisible City.” You write that it’s a city “where wildness and domestication are forever running into each other,” and a place of invisibility, with lives hidden behind tall hedges or within cars. It’s also, of course, an industry city. What does it give you as a writer?

What Los Angeles gives me as a writer (and by that I mean a writer of printed material) is a certain irrelevance. I mean that in the best possible way. Even though there are a lot of journalists and authors and other non-screenwriter types here, even though (shocker alert) most of the population doesn’t work in a creative industry at all, the city’s legacy and reputation is so steeped in Hollywood that it sometimes feels like it doesn’t matter what the rest of us do. And that can be tremendously freeing. There’s no equivalent of the Brooklyn literary scene, which I imagine can be quite exhausting if you’re a writer in New York City. So I can spend more time writing and less time negotiating the trappings of being a writer. Plus people live in larger spaces here. I have a beautiful room I use as an office. I have bougainvillea and a magnolia tree outside my window. Not that anything will ever beat the view I had from my desk window in my little farmhouse in Nebraska. Just a dirt road stretching out as far as you could see, with prairie grass on either side. That sounds made up, but it’s not. I get a little choked up just thinking about it, actually. That landscape is so beautiful to me it makes me teary. And I’m not a big crier. But, strangely enough, L.A.’s landscape has been a close second. Both places give you coyotes howling at night.

Together, the essays form a surprisingly unified portrait of a woman in the middle of her life, trying to figure out where exactly she fits in her life. At one point, you ask, “How did I get to be middle-aged without actually growing up?” Did you write these essays with a collection in mind? Did you know the shape and form you wanted the book to take from the outset?

It’s true that the book in many ways is about growing up and growing older and the various doors that close and open throughout that trajectory. But I didn’t set out to write a book about aging. Probably I was just preoccupied with those issues, and those preoccupations guided the work. Being in your forties is a strange interlude. You’re not considered young anymore, but it seems a bit premature to call yourself middle-aged (or maybe that’s wishful thinking). So it’s an interesting time to explore. And I think the essays touch on subjects that will resonate with people of all ages and at all stages of their lives. “My Misspent Youth,” the essay collection I published in 2001, might have been a young person’s book, to some extent. But I don’t see the essays in “The Unspeakable” as being specific to any particular cohort or generation. I see them as being about the challenges of living authentically but also compassionately, productive, sanely, and so on. And that challenge is ongoing throughout life.

Your experiences have formed the heart of your nonfiction since you started out as a writer in your twenties. You’re not all that easy on yourself—you highlight your weaknesses, your indulgences, your moments of self-deception—and you turn that bracing clarity on those around you, too. Does this ever give you pause? Are there subjects you won’t write about for this reason? Could you have published an essay about your mother when she was alive and written it with the same degree of honesty?

In the book’s introduction, I say that even though the essays might appear to reveal all, every disclosure has been carefully chosen. For every detail that may be shocking enough to suggest that I’m spilling my guts, there are hundreds I’ve chosen to leave out. Nothing makes me cringe more than when someone says something like “Well, you really put it all out there.” I always think, “If you only knew what’s not there!” There’s an essay in the book about Joni Mitchell. It talks about the problem of being labelled a confessionalist, as she often is, when in fact you’re attempting something much more nuanced and generous, something outward-looking rather than navel-gazing. Part of the reason Mitchell’s work has been so important to me over the years is that she has such a gift for taking very private, vulnerable moments and sending them into another dimension. It’s like she takes her experiences out of herself and puts them into orbit. Her “confessions” are really seeds of much bigger and more nuanced observations about life in general. That’s something I strive to do in my own work. Not that I’ll ever do it as successfully as Joni did and does at her best but it’s something I value as a writer and as a reader/listener alike.

As to whether I could have published a totally honest essay about my mother while she was alive, the answer is no. But I would imagine that anyone who isn’t a sociopath would answer the same way.

Your husband is a writer, too, and he’s sometimes a character in your pieces. In “Difference Maker,” for example, you describe in pretty revealing terms the way your attitudes toward parenthood start to diverge. What’s the negotiation like in your house about who gets to write what? At what stage do you show him your work?

My husband and I are very different kinds of writers—entirely different, actually. He is an investigative reporter at the L.A. Times. He covered science and medicine for years, and his latest work focusses on military veterans. He’s also been a foreign correspondent in Africa and Latin America. He covered the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide and has written about stem-cell scams and inequities in the organ-transplant system. He’s the smartest person I know, and I have so much respect for what he does and how he does it. But our work never intersects. If there’s a discussion in our house as to who’s going to write about a scandal at the Department of Veterans Affairs and who’s going to write a think piece about HBO’s “Girls,” it’s not like we have to draw straws. As for writing about him, that involves an ongoing conversation. “Difference Maker” is obviously very revealing about certain aspects of our marriage. But we talked a lot throughout the process of my writing it, and I would never have included anything he was uncomfortable with. He has such a fundamental and unshakable respect for the truth that I think the only thing that would give him pause was something that was less than truthful.

In “The Dog Exception,” you mourn the death of your dog Rex. For someone who loathes sentimentality in most parts of her life, you revelled in it with Rex. Did you find a dog that could take Rex’s place?

Rex was such an exceptional dog that it took two dogs to “replace” him—and they are so large, they weigh a combined two hundred and forty pounds. I spend a lot of time vacuuming. They’re great dogs and we love them, but I miss Rex every day. He’s kind of like that view outside my window in Nebraska. I’ll cry if I think about him too much. But that in and of itself is a piece of luck. We should all be so lucky to have a pet whose loss could make us weep at any given time for the rest of our lives.