A NEW YORK TIMES 100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2019 SELECTION 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 book that reaches surprising truths about feminism, the Trump era, and the Resistance movement. You won’t be able to stop thinking about it and talking about it. In the fall of 2016, acclaimed author Meghan Daum began working on a book about the excesses of contemporary feminism. With Hillary 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, all-encompassing, and unputdownable book 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 book to capture the essence of this era in all its nuances and contradictions. No matter where you stand on its issues, this book will strike a chord.
Author
Meghan Daum is the author of Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived In That House, a personal chronicle of real estate addiction and obsessive fascination with houses, as well as the novel The Quality of Life Report and the essay collection My Misspent Youth. Since 2005 she has written a weekly column for The Los Angeles Times, which appears on the op-ed page every Thursday. She has contributed to public radio's Morning Edition, Marketplace and This American Life and has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, Harper's, GQ, Vogue, Self, New York, Travel & Leisure, BlackBook, Harper's Bazaar, The Village Voice, and The New York Times Book Review. Equal parts reporter, storyteller, and satirist, Meghan has inspired controversy over a range of topics, including social politics, class warfare and the semiotics of shag carpet. She has been widely praised in the press and elicits particular enthusiasm from Amazon.com customer reviewers, who have hailed her work as everything from "brilliant and outrageously funny" to "obnoxious, arrogant, rambling dribble," (sic). Meghan's work is included in dozens of college textbooks and anthologies, including The KGB Bar Reader, Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times, and The New Gilded Age: The New Yorker Looks at the Culture of Affluence. Born in California in 1970, Meghan was raised primarily on the east coast and is a graduate of Vassar College and the MFA writing program at Columbia University's School of the Arts. She spent several years in New York City before making her now-infamous move to Nebraska in 1999, where she continued to work as an essayist and journalist and wrote The Quality of Life Report. Meghan has taught at various institutions, including California Institute for the Arts, where she was a visiting artist in 2004 and taught graduate nonfiction writing. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Alan Zarembo, and their sheepdog, Rex
