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" 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
Singer-Songwriter
Young
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" 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
Experience
Sit
Own
" Because of social media, we have a lot of personal essays floating around; you see them on Facebook: everyone's either reading them or writing them. Some of them are great; some of them are diary entries put forth as essays. "
Meghan Daum
Reading
Writing
Social Media
" 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
Early
Always
Journalism
" 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
Sometimes
Direction
Hard
" It is important for children to grow up in a world where there are all kinds of adults and role models around them, for them to know it's not just parents and people who are parents that care about them, but that there are people who are living other kinds of lives. "
Meghan Daum
Care
World
People
" It's great that Time is moving in the direction of validating those who, by choice or circumstance, will never be parents. But the point is not simply that society should stop judging those of us who don't have children. It's that society actually needs us. Children need us. "
Meghan Daum
Great
Children
Time
" Non-fiction about personal subjects is going to attract more user comments than a foreign correspondent writing from Syria - unfortunately. "
Meghan Daum
Going
Writing
Personal
" To me, having 'material' for an essay means not only having something to write about but also having something interesting and original to say about whatever that might be. "
Meghan Daum
Say
Interesting
Me
" I have a distinct memory, dating back to 1989 or so, of sitting around with my college dorm mates talking about a new term that was popping up everywhere: 'political correctness.' "
Meghan Daum
College
Dating
Memory
" 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
Road
View
Tree
" When I made my final reckoning with the decision not to have kids, I also decided that I would use at least some of my extra time to better the lives of kids who are already here. "
Meghan Daum
Some
Time
Better
" The irony of the media and people in big cities is that they're charged with defining the entire culture, when in reality they don't even live in that culture. They live in such a rarified, tiny world. "
Meghan Daum
People
Culture
Live
" When there's so much choice, it can get overwhelming and it's hard to make a choice. "
Meghan Daum
Make
Choice
Hard
" I think people seem to want to read pieces that are shorter but not as short as the pieces they can read in small bites on the Internet. It may be that the sort of long essays are hitting a sweet spot between the tiny morsels online and the full-length book. "
Meghan Daum
Book
Small
Short
" 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
Body
Bread
Tradition
" Like a physically beautiful but otherwise rather dull person who trades on his or her looks, Southern California swings perpetually between a profound inferiority complex and an equally profound sense of entitlement. "
Meghan Daum
California
Person
Looks
" In my own writing, I tend to be very honest, and my goal is to identify something people think but are afraid to say. That's not the general cultural expectation of women. "
Meghan Daum
Writing
People
Think
" Old-fashioned girl that I am, I still have a landline, though it rarely rings - and when it does, especially without warning, there's rarely anything good on the other end. "
Meghan Daum
Warning
Without
Girl
" 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
Me
Hard
Away
" L.A. is a constellation of microclimates and microcosms, a library with dozens of special collections. A 20-minute drive can bring a temperature change of 15 degrees. Crossing an intersection can feel like crossing a national border. "
Meghan Daum
Feel
Library
Drive
" It may take a village to raise a child, but not every villager needs to be a mom or dad. Some of us just need to be who we are. "
Meghan Daum
Mom
Just
Child
" I love the essay. It's my favorite genre to work in. "
Meghan Daum
Genre
Work
Love
" As with 'feminism,' not to mention 'liberalism' and 'conservatism,' 'political correctness' tends to mean what you want it to mean, which also pretty much amounts to utter meaninglessness. "
Meghan Daum
Feminism
You
Political
" I don't confess in my work because to me, that implies that you're dumping all your guilt and sins on the page and asking the reader to forgive you. "
Meghan Daum
Guilt
You
Work
" If you do the things you enjoy and are good at, I really have a feeling that that will lead to having a fulfilling life, and people with fulfilling lives are able to be 'good people.' "
Meghan Daum
People
Good People
Good
" 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
Email
Us
Message
" 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
Digital
Home
Infinite
" To be honored by success is to take your life seriously. To humble-talk about it is to take yourself seriously. "
Meghan Daum
Seriously
Yourself
Your
" People who choose not to have kids do so because they respect the job of parenting so much that they know not to take it on if they know it's not something that they're up for, and I don't know what to be a bigger tribute to parenting than that. "
Meghan Daum
Respect
Job
Parenting
" This whole notion that it's somehow easy and simpler to live in the country is such a fallacy. "
Meghan Daum
Simpler
Country
Easy