Meghan Daum prided herself on candor. Then the invites stopped coming

Everyone has a friend who likes to tell it how it really is. They wear their iconoclasm like a badge of pride. They’re the contrarian at the party who delights in puncturing polite shibboleths, unafraid to take on even their own tribes in pursuit of a deeper truth. Real talk, for them, is the only honest and authentic kind of dialogue.

Meghan Daum is a fully paid-up member of the real-talk brigade. She’s been an opinion writer here at The Times (from 2005 to 2016) and a personal essayist of sometimes provocative proclivities for decades. Her 2014 collection “The Unspeakable” exemplified her disdain for being “phony for the sake of decorum.” Subjects including the death of her mother — “I was as relieved as I’d planned to be” — and her decision to get married (or not) and have children (or not) were placed under unsentimental scrutiny. The book won Daum the PEN Center USA Literary Award for creative nonfiction; more than a decade later, it still entertains.

Since then, things have taken a bit of a turn, both for Daum and for our culture at large. As she writes perhaps misleadingly in her new collection, “The Catastrophe Hour,” “the exact opinions and observations that had made me the toast of the town in 2015 were getting me removed from guest lists little more than a year later.” As the Trump era dawned, Daum found herself increasingly frustrated by fourth-wave feminism, which she described in 2019 as “the hashtag, the eye-rolling GIF, and, more seriously, the beginnings of questioning the whole idea of a gender binary.” With Hillary Clinton’s loss to Trump in 2016, “much of the country lost its appetite for the sort of critique I was offering.”

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She’s since published a book-length analysis of the culture wars, “The Problem With Everything,” started a podcast that serves up conversations about “gender and leftist overreach week after week,” and launched The Unspeakeasy, a “community for free-thinking women” that offers private online discussion forums and even mini retreats around the U.S.

Unlike most of Daum’s books, “The Catastrophe Hour” wasn’t conceived as a unitary volume and doesn’t offer a single thesis. Some of the pieces, written as early as 2016, were first published on Medium, others on Substack; three essays, the most substantial, are new. Perhaps as a consequence, it feels rather disjointed, even if some signature preoccupations do emerge. It’s certainly somewhat about the culture wars (once you start, it’s hard to stop), while it also touches on aging and the “precocious obsolescence” of her Gen X confreres.

As in much of Daum’s work, her main subject is herself — her divorce, her life in New York and L.A., her father’s death, her love of dogs, her passion for real estate. She writes about the challenges of surviving in an economy of independent creators and how the valuation of her work has declined from a “once-respectable pay grade to something rivaling the proceeds from a child’s lemonade stand.”

“The Catastrophe Hour” has some good bits. Daum has always written rather ruthlessly about her parents, and there are some vividly unpleasant details in her account of her father’s death, including the bones broken by the EMTs who tried to resuscitate him and the tilting of his body to fit into his apartment building’s elevator. She’s also darkly humorous about her own mortality. When looking for a new house in L.A., she notes, “The carport had tandem parking spaces. That’s good, I thought. My hospice nurse can park on the left.”

Noting the city’s famously-hot real estate scene, she presciently observes: “They say the only thing that would cool the housing market in L.A. is a catastrophe. An earthquake, a terrorist attack, or fires that rolled down from the canyons en masse and engulfed the city streets.”

Sadly, after the book went to press, Daum became one of many Angelenos who lost their home in Altadena’s Eaton fire. Along with it, she has written, “every family photo ever taken.” The book reads very differently in places as a result.

Some of the pieces in the book written before this real-life catastrophe, though, suffer from the rote world-weariness of the columnist accustomed to griping to order. “Does anyone use the word ‘album’ anymore?” Daum asks in one of many mundane asides. “Can’t I just tell you my order?” she asks a cashier assigned to help customers navigate a checkout app. “Today,” she writes, in a baffling third-person voice, “the writer no longer goes to the movies.” Much would have been better left online.

Perhaps most egregious is an essay titled “What I Have in Common With Trans Activists,” adapted from Substack and thus presumably innocent of much editorial intervention. In it, Daum compares “the way many gender-dysphoric young people can get manically focused on transitioning” with the angst she’d once had about whether or not to have children. Notwithstanding the spuriousness of the analogy, she goes on to use a kind of feigned empathy to attack trans people and trans activists for “not living in the real world but in a walled city of their own confirmation bias.” She refers derisively to the “aspirational kind” of gender dysphoria.

All this succeeds in doing is demonstrating Daum’s failure to imagine how someone else’s experience might differ from her own. Perhaps it’s a consequence of her internet habits. “I spent an average of ten hours a day online,” she admits in one essay. Elsewhere: “I know nearly everything there is to know about the current gender identity movement, including everything J. K. Rowling has and hasn’t said about it, but I haven’t read a single Harry Potter book.” (This isn’t to say that anyone should be made to read a Harry Potter book. But perhaps it’s worth reassessing your priorities if Rowling’s implosion occupies so much of your time.)

“Ever since the publication of my last book, which made an honest appraisal of the culture war, I’ve been somewhat non grata in certain literary circles,” Daum writes. And there it is: the “honest” appraisal. This is the rhetorical device the real-talk brigade uses to self-authenticate its own arguments, to tear down the straw people they establish as the targets of their ire. It’s a method of justifying saying out loud what Daum might still call the unspeakable — even if that feels, in 2025, like a sadly outmoded concept. “It’s possible you stopped getting invited to the party because you didn’t toe its ever-narrowing line,” Daum writes knowingly. There could be other reasons.

In recent months Daum has spoken on her podcast and written in the New York Times about how the fire has utterly changed her life: A lifelong commitment to self-reliance, inherited from her parents, has given way to a new understanding of the relationship between help and love. The Times piece, more urgent and insightful than much of what’s in “The Catastrophe Hour,” shows that Daum remains capable of the clear-eyed self-analysis that characterizes her best work. Will it hold? Whatever happens, she’ll keep us posted.

Arrowsmith is based in New York and writes about books, films and music.