I love writing essays and articles, so it’s hard for me to resist taking assignments that inevitably pull me away from larger projects. – Meghan Daum
Though I probably shouldn’t admit this, the activities and pursuits in which I’ve achieved any measure of success are, without exception, activities and pursuits that came easily to me from the beginning. – Meghan Daum
The first person is a tradition I relate to and that I use; historically, it’s been the voice I work in. But the hair on the back of my neck stands up when I’m referred to as a ‘confessional’ writer. – Meghan Daum
Not everyone in Santa Monica is a well-heeled, juice-cleansing, Prius-driving yogini, but for better or worse, that is the city’s dominant chord. – Meghan Daum
Let’s face it: every campus has its share of students who can’t quite comprehend that extreme political correctness is often born of the same intolerance and anti-intellectualism as standard-issue bigotry. – Meghan Daum
What I think is important about essayists – about the essay, as opposed to a lot of personal writing that kind of finds its way into public view – is that the material really has to be presented in a processed way. – Meghan Daum
I have bougainvillea and a magnolia tree outside my window. Not that anything will ever beat the view I had from my desk window in my little farmhouse in Nebraska. Just a dirt road stretching out as far as you could see, with prairie grass on either side. – Meghan Daum
Social media, despite its reputation as the ultimate agent of self-promotion, actually feeds on self-loathing. – Meghan Daum
If you must know, my parents came from pretty hardscrabble backgrounds in the southern Midwest. I certainly didn’t grow up poor, but I did spend my 20s and early 30s juggling temp jobs and choking on massive student-loan debt. – Meghan Daum
Before digital and mobile communications effectively tethered us to an invisible, infinite ‘wire,’ even those with the most hectic schedules were usually willing to answer the phone if they happened to be home when it rang. – Meghan Daum
There’s this tradition of women’s magazines – which have been my bread and butter as a freelancer – where the paradigm is that the writing is about relationships, body image, lessons, and it’s always redemptive. – Meghan Daum
Choose what you actually want to do rather than what you think will impress people on Facebook. Ironically, when you do this, something amazing happens; what you produce stands a better chance of getting recognition. Not just on Facebook, but in the real world. – Meghan Daum
A typical day in my writing life starts with looking at pictures of real estate online for at least 20 minutes. If I happen to be actually in the market for a house, I do this for 40 minutes. Then I walk my dog, come back home, and tell myself I can look at real estate for another five minutes. – Meghan Daum
I always lamented that I wasn’t a writer during the late ’60s and the early ’70s, with the New Journalism and Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson and all those people. – Meghan Daum
A young female essayist saying they’re influenced by Joan Didion is like a young female singer-songwriter saying they’re influenced by Joni Mitchell. – Meghan Daum
I started off doing fiction in 1993. It didn’t occur to me to do nonfiction because it wasn’t a thing yet. So I was bumbling around, writing short stories, and then I took a nonfiction workshop, and I realized that this was what I was supposed to do. – Meghan Daum
Checking email every 45 seconds is not only compulsive, it’s presumptuous. It suggests a belief that anyone who sends us a message needs us to read it immediately, even if the message is from SkyMall telling us our Bigfoot Garden Yeti statue has shipped. – Meghan Daum
I never sit down to write anything personal unless I know the subject is going to go beyond my own experience and address something larger and more universal. – Meghan Daum
In the world of opinion writing, there’s something called the ‘to be sure’ paragraph. A sort of rhetorical antibiotic, it seeks to defend against critics by injecting a tiny bit of counter-argument before moving on with the main point. – Meghan Daum
The reason it was so bruising when someone said I was from a rich family is that, like many of us, I’m deeply invested – probably overly so – in the myth of my own self-creation. I like to believe that I got where I am, such as it is, by working hard and charting my own course. – Meghan Daum
The point of essays is the point of writing anything. It’s not to tell people what they already think or to give them more of what they already believe; it’s to challenge people, and it’s to suggest alternate ways of thinking about things. – Meghan Daum
I work really hard not to have a kitsch tone to any of my work, particularly radio stuff, which sometimes goes in that direction on certain programs. – Meghan Daum
For a kid, self-esteem can be as close at hand as a sports victory or a sense of belonging in a peer group. It’s a much more complicated and elusive proposition for adults, subject to the responsibilities and vicissitudes of grown-up life. – Meghan Daum
It was a challenge for me to do a plot because I’d been an essayist and a journalist. I had to be vigilant about moving things along and being entertaining. – Meghan Daum
I think whatever generation you’re in has a nostalgia for the generations past and the generations you weren’t in. – Meghan Daum
This whole notion that it’s somehow easy and simpler to live in the country is such a fallacy. – Meghan Daum
Just as I never liked bumper stickers – even though I do brake for animals, and if I had a kid, she would definitely be an honor student – I don’t like the idea of expressing my views through social-media-controlled rainbow-or-anything-else-ification. – Meghan Daum
