This image is the cover for the book My Misspent Youth

My Misspent Youth

The cult classic essay collection from “one of the most emotionally exacting, mercilessly candid, deeply funny . . . writers of our time” (Cheryl Strayed, The New York Times Book Review).

First published in 2001, My Misspent Youthcaptured a generation’s uneasy coming of age as the world made its chaotic way into a new millennium. It also established Meghan Daum as a leading literary voice, widely celebrated for her fresh, provocative approach to the hidden fault lines of America’s cultural landscape.

From her New Yorker essays about the financial demands of big-city ambition and the ethereal, strangely old-fashioned allure of cyber-relationships to her dazzlingly hilarious riff about musical passions that give way to middle-brow paraphernalia, Daum delves into the center of things while closely examining the detritus that spills out along the way. With precision and well-balanced irony, Daum implicates herself as readily as she does the targets that fascinate and horrify her.

Meghan Daum

MEGHAN DAUM is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, the author of Unspeakable, Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House,The Quality of Life Report. and the editor of Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The New York Times Book Review, Vogue, and other publications.

Picador