Written by Meghan Daum | 22 January 2013

I'm supposed to be writing a new book (and I am; I really am!) but in addition to the LA Times column I still sometimes get sidetracked by magazine assignments I can't resist and/or ideas that I must express right away lest the cultural moment pass. So in case you missed them (and considering that they range from The New Yorker blog to Redbook, you probaby missed some of them) here are a few recent examples.

Is Elizabeth Wurtzel Hannah Horvath's cautionary tale? My take on Wurtzel's much-discussed January 6 New York magazine article vis-a-vis Lena Dunham's GIRLS alter-ego, Hannah, who I suspect would give anything to be able to write and publish a book like Prozac Nation.

 What Would Hannah Horvath Make of Elizabeth Wurtzel? The New Yorker online, January 11, 2013

This is 40? Yeah, yeah. I know all movies are fantasies on some level and I know Judd Apatow en famille really do live like this as 40-somethings but, uh, stil . . .

 This is Not Forty, The New Yorker online, December 29, 2012

This one was a wildcard. Redbook magazine approached me about participating in a project they were doing in collaboration with The White House and The Wounded Warrior Project about military spouses who become fulltime caregivers to veterans with traumatic brain injury. These are wrenching, humbling, important stories. I'm not going to say they're inspiring; that word is overused and we really shouldn't take any inspiration from what these families are going through. We should take action. Or at least fight for it.

 Caregivers: Celebrating The Invisible War Heroes, Redbook, November 2012

And here is a video about Debbie and Brandon. I had the privilege of interviewing them in their home in Hemet, CA.

About as far from a story about military spouses and brain injury as you can get. A treatise on the exasperating, exhilarating, sometimes bewildering, never boring writer Katie Roiphe on the occasion of her latest book, the essay collection In Praise of Messy Lives. This was something I'd wanted to write for a long time.

In Praise of Messy Thinking: On Katie Roiphe, Los Angeles Review of Books, September 4, 2012

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Written by Meghan Daum | 29 December 2012

I love Paul Gilmartin's podcast The Mental Illnes Happy Hour. It's like listening in on the therapy sessions of comedians and other funny, interesting people except the sessions usually last more than "the 50 minute hour" and the therapist is also funny and interesting.

Last year Paul invited me to do an interview. It was a lot of fun but in my typical fashion I kind of kept it under the radar so no one I knew would hear it. However,  my mother-in-law recently told me she'd heard it so I figured there was nothing left to lose.

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Written by Meghan Daum | 25 December 2012

For most of the year I'm more than happy with my decision not to have kids. But then the holidays come around and I want to send out cards and realize I can't because somehow this has turned into a thing that only parents are allowed to do.

It didn't used to be this way. It used to be that people just sent regular cards and if they wanted to stick in a snapshot or some school portraits of their kids that was a perfectly fine option. But it wasn't standard. It wasn't de rigueur. It wasn't the kind of thing where if your holiday card did not include a photo of your kids it would be relegated to the pile of impersonal, pre-printed cards sent by your insurance agent and your dentist and the place where you get your hair cut.

In recent years, as I've written about in the past, holiday cards are all about photo cards showing the kids. And let's face it, if you're a childless couple and you send a photo card featuring multiple shots of the two of you walking on the beach or hiking in the woods or laughing with your heads thrown back, you have likely created something that looks like an advertisement for herpes medication. If you're a single person and you send a version of this card you look like you're selling yogurt (that is, if you're a woman; if you're a man it would never occur to you to do this at all.)

 Or you can do a card like this one, which I made last year but never actually sent. I figured it was the kind of thing that represented the line between dog people and dog people and that I didn't need those kinds of italics in my life.

But now that I'm seeing it again I actually think it looks pretty good. Maybe next year I'll make a calendar.

Happy holidays.

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Written by Meghan Daum | 30 June 2012

There are few guarantees in life, but one of them is that women writing about their personal experiences will almost instantly trigger a cascade of gripes about their narcissism, their privilege, the hubris that's inherent to the sharing of personal details and feelings. Writing about parenting often has that effect. Writing about not parenting nearly always does.

Before Anne-Marie Slaughter's Atlantic cover story "Why Women Still Can't Have It All" swept in and effectively blew all other conversations into great, desiccating piles by the curb, a series of articles in the online magazine Slate entitled Childfree Women Explain Themselves was drawing lots of attention. In response to a rather inflamed reaction to Katie Roiphe's theory that parents secretly pity the childless, Slate's Double X editors invited happily childless readers to share their reasons for not reproducing.

 The result was six testimonials that drew thousands of comments (the kickoff piece by Soraya Roberts has more than 3200 to date.) Many of those comments were from people who shared or at least understood the choice not to become a parent. Some, predictably, took it upon themselves to set the writers straight and enumerate the reasons that you can't know what real love is--or live a real life--without raising children. Along the way, of course, there were countless remarks about how no one cares. "If you don't want to have children don't," wrote one commenter. "But please stop yammering about it to the rest of us."

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