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" 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. "

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" 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

World

Moving

Moving On

" To be honored by success is to take your life seriously. To humble-talk about it is to take yourself seriously. "

" I loved Woody Allen's short pieces. I was equally influenced by Woody Allen and Norman Mailer. I was very into this idea of being high-low, of being serious and intellectual but also making really broad jokes. "

" Much of the magic of language, of course, lies in its fluidity. "

" 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. "

" We don't want privacy so much as privacy settings. "

" 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

" Confessions are not processed or analysed; they're told in a moment of desperation to a priest or to somebody interrogating you about a crime. "

" Handwriting challenges aside, I love paper cards. I love the endless stewing involved in picking them out at the store. I love buying holiday stamps at the post office, and I love that 'whoosh' sound the cards make when I drop them into the mail slot. "

" This whole notion that it's somehow easy and simpler to live in the country is such a fallacy. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Quitting Facebook would be like partially erasing myself. Quitting Twitter would constitute further erasure. Pretty soon, I'd be invisible. I was never on Instagram or Tumblr, which I guess means I never completely existed in the first place. "

" 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. "

" There's a particular kind of single woman whose relationship with her dog has a level of intensity and affection that may be both the cause and the result of her singleness. For a long time, I was that woman. "

" 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. "

" 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

" 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.' "

" My goal is to invite readers to think along with me and draw their own conclusions. "

" 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

Hard

Away

" I loved 'About Schmidt'. I like Alexander Payne's work a lot. "

Meghan Daum

Work

Loved

" I love the essay. It's my favorite genre to work in. "

" 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

Tradition

Work

" We use our gadgets for distraction and entertainment. We use them to avoid work while giving the impression that we're actually working hard. "

" Air travelers, of course, are famous for their hubris. They carry on too many bags and use the restroom when the seat-belt sign is on. "

" 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