Uptown Girl

"These pieces are not confessions," Meghan Daum declares in the foreword to My Misspent Youth, an anthology of articles she wrote for The New Yorker, Harper's and other magazines. Nonsense. Maybe, as she claims, "a few of the stories I tell never even happened," but the first time I read her book, I finished it in a single afternoon, mesmerized and spluttering, because all the essays have the flavor of confession.

They taste, that is, like a hot fudge sundae: salty sweet. Or more exactly, they taste like an inside-out hot fudge sundae: sweet, then salty. The surface is chilly, pale, slick, sugary. Beneath is a dark hot goo, like half-coagulated blood. The difference, in texture and temperature, is exhilarating, and probably not good for you.

Just over 30, Daum has been anthologized in The KGB Bar Reader and championed by Thomas Beller, the novelist-scenester-editor of the literary journal Open City. Until she decamped last year to Nebraska (she writes about her new life there in the latest issue of O), Daum was as urbane a writer as they come. Like Joan Didion, to whom she is often compared, she is a nonfiction switch-hitter: an empathetic reporter and a provocative autobiographer. (The reported essay on flight attendants reprinted here, which Open City rescued after a men's magazine killed it, is a gem.) She owes her fame, however, to her confessions. In print she has admitted to unsafe sex, inventoried her debts and spending habits, and chronicled her waitership at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, much the way David Sedaris chronicled his elfhood at Macy's SantaLand. In the first person lies her weakness--and her strength.

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