Review of the 'Hour Catastrophe: an essayist confronts changing tastes

Everyone has a friend who likes to say how that Really East. They carry their iconoclasm as a insignia of pride. They are against the current of the party which reveling to unravel polished shiboboleths, without afraid of even taking their own tribes in search of a deeper truth. The real speech, for them, is the only type of honest and authentic dialogue.

Meghan Daum is an entirely paid member of the Talk Real brigade. She was an editor here in Times (from 2005 to 2016) and a personal essayist of sometimes provocative trends for decades. His 2014 collection “The Esionable” illustrated his disdain to be “false for the good of the decorum”. Subjects, including the death of his mother – “I was as relieved as I was planning to be” – and his decision to get married (or not) and have children (or not) was placed under a meticulous examination. The book won Daum The Pen Center USA Literary Award for Creative Nonfiction; More than a decade later, he still entertains.

Since then, things have taken a little turn, both for Daum and for our culture as a whole. As she may write in her new collection, “The catastrophe Hour”, “the exact opinions and observations that had made me the city toast in 2015 made me remove guest lists a little more than a year later.” While the Trump era belonged, Daum was increasingly frustrated by the feminism of the fourth wave, which she described in 2019 as “the hashtag, the excessive gif of the eyes and, more seriously, the beginnings to question the whole idea of ​​a binary of gender”. With the defeat of Hillary Clinton against Trump in 2016, “a large part of the country lost his appetite for the kind of criticism I offered.”

Since then, she has published an analysis of the length of the Book of Cultural Wars, “the problem with everything”, began a podcast which serves conversations on “gender and grenan surpassing the week after week” and launched nonsense, a “community for free women” which offers private online discussion forums and even mini-retirements in the United States

Unlike most Daum's books, “The catastrophe Hour” was not designed as a unitary volume and does not offer a single thesis. Some of the pieces, written in 2016, were published for the first time on Medium, others on substal; Three most substantial tests are new. Perhaps as a result, it seems rather disjointed, even if certain concerns of emerging signature. These are certainly somewhat cultural wars (once you start, it is difficult to stop), while it also touches the aging and “early obsolescence” of his colleagues from generation X.

As in a large part of Daum's work, her main subject is herself – her divorce, her life in New York and Los Angeles, the death of his father, his love of dogs, his passion for real estate. She writes on the challenges of survival in an economy of independent creators and how the evaluation of her work has decreased by a “rating of remuneration formerly respectable to something that competes with the product of the standard of the lemonade of a child”.

“The catastrophe Hour” has good songs. Daum has always ruthlessly written about his parents, and there are very unpleasant details in his story of the death of his father, including the bones broken by the EMTs who tried to resuscitate him as well as the inclination of his body to integrate into the elevator of his building. She is also darkly humorous about her own mortality. When you are looking for a new house in Los Angeles, she notes: “The car had tandem parking spaces. It's goodI thought. My hospice nurse can park on the left.“”

Noting the famous real estate scene of the city, it observes in a precious way: “They say that the only thing that would cool the housing market in Los Angeles is a disaster. An earthquake, a terrorist attack or fires that descended canyons en masse and swallowed up the city streets. ”

Unfortunately, after the book went to press, Daum became one of the many Angelenos who lost their house in Eaton's fire in Altadena. With that, She wrote“Each family photo never taken.” The book can be read very differently in places.

However, some of the documents in the book written before this real disaster suffer from the essentials of the parmentable world of the chronicler accustomed to the control. “Does anyone use the word” album “?” Daum asks in one of the many banal characteristics. “I can't just tell you my order?” She asks a cashier assigned to help customers navigate a payment application. “Today”, she writes, in a confusing voice in the third person, “the writer is no longer going to the cinema.” Many would have been better left online.

The most blatant is perhaps an essay entitled “What I have in common with trans activists”, adapted from substitudes and therefore probably innocent of a large editorial intervention. In this document, Daum compares “the way many young gender dysphorics can be obviously focused on the transition” with the anxiety that she once had to have children or not. Despite the fulguement of the analogy, it continues to use a kind of simulated empathy to attack trans and trans activists to “do not live in the real world but in a fortified city of their own confirmation bias”. She refers derisively to the “ambitious type” of gender dysphoria.

Everything that succeeds is to demonstrate Daum's failure to imagine how someone else's experience could differ from his. It may be a consequence of its internet habits. “I spent an average of ten hours a day online,” she admits in a test. Elsewhere: “I know that almost everything there is to know about the current movement of gender identity, including all that JK Rowling has and I did not say, but I have not read a single book Harry Potter.” (This does not mean that anyone should be done to read a book by Harry Potter. But it may be worth reassessed your priorities if Rowling's implosion occupies so much of your time.)

“Since the publication of my last book, which has made an honest evaluation of the cultural war, I have been somewhat non -grata in certain literary circles,” writes Daum. And here it is: “honest” evaluation. It is the rhetorical device that the real brigade uses to authenticate its own arguments, to demolish the straw people they establish as the target of their anger. It is a method to justify saying aloud what Daum could still call the inexpressible – even if it feels, in 2025, as a sadly surpassed concept. “You may have stopped inviting yourself to the party because you don't have its line constantly,” writes Daum knowingly. There may be other reasons.

In recent months, Daum has spoken on his podcast and written The New York Times About the way in which fire has completely changed his life: life commitment to self -sufficiency, inherited from his parents, has given way to a new understanding of the relationship between help and love. The piece Times, more urgent and perceptive than what is in “The catastrophe Hour”, shows that Daum remains capable of self-analysis with clear eyes that characterizes its best work. Will he hold on? Whatever happens, she will keep us posted.

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