Bookforum talks with Meghan Daum
Meghan Daum published her first collection of essays, My Misspent Youth (2001), to wide praise. In the title essay, originally written for the New Yorker, Daum described living in Manhattan as a writer in her mid-twenties, and the difficulty of discerning truth from fantasy in a city that lends itself to easy mythologizing. Can't we all have lives like Mia Farrow’s, filled with intelligent conversation and ample gin? To Daum, an oak-floored apartment on Riverside Drive represented an urbane and “authentic” way of living, not financial prosperity. But though a flat on the Upper West Side doesn't