What remains “unspeakable” in an age of self-revelation, when shocking secrets are so much fodder for retweeted Internet confessionals? The essays in Meghan Daum’s fourth book, “The Unspeakable,” are neither shocking nor confessional, and the “unspeakable truths” they explore are rather mundane — “that we might not love our parents enough, that ‘life’s pleasures’ sometimes feel more like chores.” These are the things we don’t say because we don’t need to, dull blades worn close to the skin that cut only the wearer. Revealing them generates little sympathy, but may create a space for something more interesting.
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A columnist for the Los Angeles Times, Daum brings her wry, nervy intelligence to experiences as diverse as foster child advocacy and a cocktail party at Nora Ephron’s house. You can see Ephron’s mentorship in Daum’s writing, but also the shadowy presence of Joan Didion, particularly in “Not What It Used to Be,” Daum’s version of “Goodbye to All That,” in which Daum describes “a time in my life when I was so filled with longing for so many things that were so far out of reach that at least once a day I thought my heart would implode from the sheer force of unrequited desire.” Daum’s not a stylist on Didion’s level, and, too mired in Gen X relativism to produce anything like Didion’s moral clarity, she settles instead for brutality, often interpreting herself and others in the worst possible light.
“Matricide,” the book’s opening essay about her mother’s recent death from gallbladder cancer, is a stunning example of the effectiveness of this approach. Delivering finally speakable truths about her relationship with her mother in place of an elegy, Daum describes not a monster or an abuser, but rather a run-of-the-mill narcissist. Stifled by her own overbearing mother, Daum’s mother overshadowed Daum in turn, reinventing herself in the throes of midlife crisis as a drama teacher in her daughter’s high school. The adolescent severity Daum applies to her mother’s flaws of vanity is at least as unflattering to Daum as it is to her mother: “(S)he copied my clothes, my hair, my taste in jewelry, so much so that I started borrowing her things (they were exaggerated versions of my things: skirts that were a little too short, blazers with massive shoulder pads, dangling, Art Deco-inspired earrings).” Yet the piece is more than an exorcism, or even revenge for a kind of symbolic filicide that runs in the family. It’s a road map for the rest of the book.
As the essays meander from awful dates and disastrous speaking engagements to the painful negotiations of a childless-by-choice marriage, it’s Daum’s struggle for personhood that emerges most clearly. This fight for air becomes literal when, in the year following her mother’s death, Daum suffers a sudden and near-fatal illness that temporarily robs her of the capacity for speech. But it’s perceivable even in lighter essays like “Invisible City,” about being a noncelebrity in L.A., and “The Best Possible Experience,” in which Daum debates Lori Gottlieb, author of the vapid polemic “Marry Him,” with hilariously predictable results.
Daum’s humor occasionally seems to cover blind spots. In “Honorary Dyke,” for example, her essay about being “biologically straight, culturally lesbian,” she criticizes herself for leading women on, but never fully admits to the cruelty of being a tourist in someone else’s oppression. For Daum, butchness represents an escape from “cartoonish femininity,” but she never draws the connection between her disgust for pink and her yearning for personhood. Content instead to take potshots at girlish things, she lets the essay devolve into a list of what’s butch and what’s not, a nitpickery that seems to miss the point.
In the final essay, “Diary of a Coma,” these trappings fall away before the truly unspeakable.
One of the symptoms of Daum’s illness was an inability to speak or even think in language. Daum recovered, and so did her words, but aphasia haunts the book. “In the history of the world, a whole story has never been told,” Daum says in “Matricide.” The urgency with which she tells her story, however fractured, makes for an imperfect book that nevertheless stays with you.
Amy Gentry is a writer living in Austin, Texas. She has a doctorate in English and writes a weekly column for the Austin Chronicle called The Good Eye.
“The Unspeakable”
By Meghan Daum, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 245 pages, $26