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" 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. "

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" Obviously, nobody chooses not to have kids because they'd rather sleep in late. It's a very visceral decision, and it's a complicated decision. "

Meghan Daum

Nobody

Sleep

Decision

" 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. "

" 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

" Each year, in my quaint efforts to send out paper holiday cards with personal messages, I probably discard one for every three I actually manage to put in the mail. The reason is that my handwriting is now less legible than it was when I was in the second grade. "

" As humans with egos and feelings, none of us wants to be pilloried. But as thinkers and writers, it's our job to express opinions forthrightly and without qualifying them out of existence. "

" 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. "

" Becoming a parent is always going to be a default setting. I truly believe there will always be more people who want to have children than who don't. "

" 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. "

" I respond to about a quarter of comments. It's a good barometer of my mental health - when I'm healthy and busy, I don't read them. "

" It's not that I don't get on bandwagons; I just climb aboard only after most of the band has packed up and left for the next gig. "

" I don't think anyone's ever accused me of too much self-love. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I've been a freelancer my entire career, and, at any given time, I have several deadlines for all sorts of things, whether it's some magazine piece or ad copywriting or anything. "

" As a mentor and an advocate, I've seen no end to the ways that childless people can contribute to the lives and well-being of kids - and adults, for that matter. "

" 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. "

" The truth is that most of your Facebook friends are too busy counting their own 'likes' to pay attention to you for more than a few seconds anyway. Unless you happen to be a kitten who's in love with a baby goat, in which case you should hire a publicist immediately. "

" In about an 18-month period, my mother got sick and died, and then I had a freak illness less than a year later and almost died myself. And I found in both of those situations that there was this expectation to have a kind of transformative experience. "

" 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. "

" Our culture is so obsessed with the idea that you're going to go through a crisis or some difficult event and come out the other side a changed or improved person, and I just think that if you're honest, that often does not happen, and in fact, it shouldn't happen. "

Meghan Daum

You

Crisis

" For me, writing essays is very much about processing ideas and offering them up to the reader so that they are fully cooked. "

Meghan Daum

Writing

Much

" 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.' "

" 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. "

" Self-esteem, the kind that comes from finding the sweet spot between a healthy fondness for yourself and healthy self-skepticism, tends to get harder to come by the older we get. "

" 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. "

" Social media, despite its reputation as the ultimate agent of self-promotion, actually feeds on self-loathing. "

" 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. "

" 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

Moving

Challenge

" 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. "

" What I want is to have people's notion of adulthood no longer be so defined by being a parent. There is some kind of conventional wisdom that you're not really a mature person until you become a parent. "