THE CATASTROPHE HOUR

Growing older, growing up.

Essayist, novelist, and memoirist Daum, host of the Unspeakable podcast, gathers 14 acerbic, intimate essays written between 2016 and 2024 on a variety of themes, including marriage and divorce, childlessness and motherhood, friendship and music. Several essays focus on her abiding obsession with real estate; others on aging, dating, and death (her father’s, a beloved pet’s, and, someday, her own). The essays, she writes, “were inspired not by news headlines or social media dustups but by the free-floating anxiety that underscores and perpetuates all of that.” Now in her mid-50s, Daum feels cut off from the concerns of younger people: “For at least the last decade,” she writes, “I haven’t known what anyone is talking about and for the last several years I haven’t really cared.” What she does care about is defending her overwhelming unsuitability for marriage (“I went into marriage hoping I could be a certain kind of person and came out of it accepting that I was never going to be anyone other than what I was”) and her decision not to have children, which she elaborates on throughout and which inspired her edited collection Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed. Her struggle to reconcile her childlessness, she admits, was so painful that it led “to a life of obsessive confirmation bias.” Gen X readers (Daum was born in 1970) will likely empathize with an author who claims, “Life to me these days often feels like I’m backing up slowly from a tense and increasingly untenable situation,” and looks back at family, grief, and loss to acknowledge, “Cope is everywhere. The more years you’re alive, the greater percentage of your day is taken up by cope.”

Sharp, deft commentary.