Book Review: The Unspeakable

I’ve been reading Meghan Daum’s columns for years. When I saw she had a new collection of essays out titled The Unspeakable — and that it received the high praise of Cheryl Strayed — I immediately bought it.

The theme running through most of the pieces is “sentimentality and its discontents.” In her words:

Collectively I hoped they’d add up to a larger discussion about the way human experiences too often come with preassigned emotional responses.

In other words: We’re supposed to feel crippling sadness when someone close to us dies but we don’t. We’re supposed to have newfound insight on life after a near-death experience but we don’t. She writes with utter clarity, energy, and honesty about these sorts of gaps in emotion. It’s a pleasure to read her and it’s easy to recommend this collection. (For excellent musings on sentimentality from two other wise souls, see these two essays in the New York Times book review.)

The opening essay of Daum’s collection is about her being at the bedside of her mother as the mother dies and instead of being overcome with grief she’s preoccupied by a range of practical concerns, like how she’s going to cancel her mother’s apartment lease. Right out of the gate you know she’s going to be as honest as can be, even about the people closest to her.

In an essay on the pleasures of not being a foodie (hear hear!), she argues that she strives for contentment, not the mushy concept of happiness. Contentment doesn’t mean settling or just a “fine” life; rather it means

…feeling like I’m in the right life. Living in a place where I feel like part of a community, doing work that feels reasonably meaningful, surrounding myself with people I enjoy, respect, and in some cases love. It would mean spending as little time as possible doing things I don’t want to do.

What I’m saying is that contentment is a tall order. Not impossible, but formidable enough to elude most of us most of the time. But there’s a trick to it, a master key to all the dead bolts that lock us out of our inner peace. The key to contentment is to live life to the fullest within the confines of your comfort zone. Stay in safe waters but plunge as deeply into them as possible. If you’re good at something, do it a lot. If you’re bad at something, just don’t do it. Celebrate it. Be the best noncook you can be…

Of course, for some people, being outside their comfort zone is itself the comfort zone. I’m talking about people who backpack around developing countries with hardly any money, journalists who become addicted to covering wars, and soldiers who become addicted to fighting them.

There’s a piece on nostalgia and youth. I loved this graf:

Now that I am almost never the youngest person in any room I realize that what I miss most about those times is the very thing that drove me so mad back when I was living in them. What I miss is the feeling that nothing has started yet, that the future towers over the past, that the present is merely a planning phase for the gleaming architecture that will make up the skyline of the rest of my life. But what I forget is the loneliness of all that. If everything is ahead then nothing is behind. You have no ballast. You have no tailwinds either. You hardly ever know what to do, because you’ve hardly done anything. I guess this is why wisdom is supposed to be the consolation prize of aging. It’s supposed to give us better things to do than stand around and watch in disbelief as the past casts long shadows over the future.

The problem, I now know, is that no one ever really feels wise, least of all those who actually have it in themselves to be so. The Older Self of our imagination never quite folds itself into the older self we actually become. Instead, it hovers in the perpetual distance like a highway mirage.

Here’s Meghan Daum’s interview on the Longform podcast, which was interesting.