My Misspent Youth (review)

Book Reviews271 The best piece of writing here is "The Deer who Love to Be Hunted: A Reflection on James Dickey's Women," which leads offthe book. Although recently written, "Hunted" recounts an affair DanieU had with the famous poet and novelist. DanieU also interviews other women who were sexuaUy and professionally used by the writer. It's a haunting portrait. Dickey abused women ruthlessly, and yet many ofthe women who were involved with him remain loyal to him and his memory. DanieU s own feelings are ambiguous: "He loved ... to seek out the mystery layered beneath reality, to put it into words and rhythms. If only he could have kept it to that." Another fine bit of reportage is "The Scandal that Shook Savannah," which recounts the now-famous murder that formed the basis for Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. For my money, DanieU captures in a dozen pages the flavor of her adopted hometown without the sometimes tedious myth-making of either the more famous novel or film. DanieU relates a comment a "feminist spokesman" made to her when she was promoting Fatal Flowers. DanieU reports the woman as saying to her, "You're Uke a combination of Harper's Bazaar and Screw magazine." The reader feels that DanieU is quite proud of that characterization. When Ms. magazine rejected her poems for having "too much blood in them," DanieU repUed that when she has bloodless poems, she'U send them. Confessions ofa (Female) Chauvinist is not afraid to bleed, but with style—the only way DanieU knows how to do things. Reviewed by MarcJ. Sheehan My Misspent Youth by Meghan Daum Open City Books, 2001 177 pages, paper, $14.00 In the introduction to My Misspent Youth, Meghan Daum explains: "The pieces in this book ... are aU about the way intense life experiences take on the qualities ofscenes from movies. They are about remoteness. They are about missing the point. They are about the fictional narratives that overpower the actual events . . . They are about the romantic notions that screw up real life while we're not looking." As you might surmise, Daum is one of the spokespersons for life in the Gen-X slow lane. In My MisspentYouth, she unabashedly describes in wellstructured essays her abhorrence for wall-to-wall carpeting, her gritty 272Fourth Genre preference for stuffed animals over doUs, and her financially dangerous Uaison with a lifestyle found only in an eight-block area on the upperWest Side of Manhattan. She is an articulate writer who has developed her self-consciousness about style into a literary category appreciated by editors at The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review and Magazine, Newsday, GQ, Harper's, and producers at National Public Radio. Daum's is the voice of discontent in the dull winter of the 1990s. Her essays are an engagement with the delight of having an attitude and pithy awareness of style. Her energized honesty about the necessities of ease and entitlement makes her, to her fans anyway, the voice oftheir generation. It's too bad she wasn't born twenty-five years earlier. She could have written about fern bars, compact cars, hootenannies, fluoridation, and panty hose. She also could have written about Kent State, the Freedom Riders, Watts, and fragging. The review that I wrote the week before September 11th went on, like this, in a jocular rant on Daum's lack of serious material. I said, "Daum is the queen ofthe disinterested, semidetached." I said that when I reached the middle of the book, I began to wish someone would die. "The death of someone close to her would give her what she lacks, the knowledge that some losses deserve at least a few moments ofregret." It was a cranky review by a Boomer who feared and loathed her Gen-Xer attitudes about getting and spending and laying waste her hour. When I read the last essay in the book, "Variations on Grief," about the death ofa long-time friend I thought she was finaUy going to grapple with moral reaUsm. But she didn't. So I said, "Daum wrote an honest, detailed, erudite piece on loss without conceding...