Short Version

Writer and podcaster Meghan Daum is the author of several books, including the forthcoming The Catastrophe Hour: Selected Essays. Her last book was The Problem With Everything: My Journey Through The New Culture Wars. She is also the author of the collection of original essays The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion, which won the 2015 PEN Center USA Award for creative nonfiction and the editor of the New York Times bestseller Selfish, Shallow & Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers  on the Decision Not To Have Kids. Her other books include the essay collection My Misspent Youth, the novel The Quality of Life Report, and Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived In That House, a memoir.  

In 2019 Meghan became a biweekly columnist for Medium’s GEN magazine and was later part of a stable of regular bloggers for Medium. From 2005 to 2016 she was an oped columnist for The Los Angeles Times. Her work has been included in The Best American Essays and she has written for numerous magazines, including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Atlantic, and Vogue. She is the recipient of a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship.

In 2020, Meghan launched The Unspeakable Podcast, a weekly interview show featuring candid, free-ranging conversations with interesting people. In 2022, she founded The Unspeakeasy, a project devoted to fostering viewpoint diversity and free expression among women.

LONG VERSION:

Meghan Daum is a writer, podcaster, teacher, and entrepreneur known for her essays, opinion columns, and intellectual community building.

The author of six books, Meghan was a columnist for Medium’s GEN magazine from 2019 to 2021 and an op-ed columnist for The Los Angeles Times from 2005 to 2016. In April 2025 she will publish her seventh book, The Catastrophe Hour: Selected Essays (Notting Hill Editions). Her last book, The Problem With Everything: My Journey Through The New Culture Wars (Gallery Books) was a New York Times Notable Book for 2019. She is also the author of The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion , which won the 2015 PEN Center USA Award for creative nonfiction.

Meghan is also the editor of the New York Times bestselling anthology Selfish, Shallow & Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers On the Decision Not to Have Kids (Picador 2015.) From 2016 to 2018 Meghan wrote the Egos column in The New York Times Book Review, covering new memoirs. Meghan has contributed to numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and Vogue. She is the recipient of a 2015 Guggenheim fellowship in general nonfiction and a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in creative writing.

Meghan’s other books include Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived In That House (Knopf 2010), a personal chronicle of real estate addiction and obsessive fascination with houses, the novel The Quality of Life Report (Viking 2003) and the essay collection My Misspent Youth (Open City 2001), which was reissued by Picador in November 2015. Her work has been included in The Best American Essays and she has contributed to public radio's Morning Edition, Marketplace and This American Life and has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, Harper's, GQ, Elle, and Vogue. Her work is also included in dozens of college textbooks and anthologies, including Goodbye To All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York, The KGB Bar Reader, Sex and Sensibility, Howl: A Collection of the Best Contemporary Dog Wit and The New Gilded Age: The New Yorker Looks at the Culture of Affluence among many others.

Born in California in 1970, Meghan was raised primarily on the east coast and is a graduate of Vassar College and the MFA writing program at Columbia University's School of the Arts. She spent several years in New York City before making her now-infamous move to Nebraska in 1999, where she continued to work as an essayist and journalist and wrote The Quality of Life Report while living out her longtime fantasy of literally residing in a little house on the prairie. In 2003, she moved to Los Angeles, where she hosted and moderated numerous interviews and panels for public event series such as Zócalo Public Square, the LA Public Library's ALOUD program, and Live Talks L.A.

Meghan has been on the adjunct faculty in the MFA writing division at Columbia University's School of the Arts and has taught at the California Institute for the Arts and numerous conferences and literary festivals, including the Aspen Writers' Festival, the Virginia Quarterly Review Writers’ Conference, the Lighthouse Writers' Literary Festival, the Kentucky Women Writers Conference, and the Nebraska Summer Writers' Conference. In the spring of 2017 she served as the Bedell Distinguished Visiting Writer in the Nonfiction MFA Program at the University of Iowa. She has been a mentor in PEN USA's Emerging Voices Program and a foster child advocate for Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA) of Los Angeles County.

In 2020, Meghan launched The Unspeakable Podcast, a weekly interview podcast featuring free-ranging conversations in the spirit of honest inquiry and intellectual curiosity. Her guests have included Sam Harris, John McWhorter, Jonathan Haidt, Lionel Shriver, Maria Bamford, Moon Unit Zappa, Nadine Strossen, and hundreds of others. She also runs The Unspeakable with Meghan Daum on Substack as well as The Unspeakable on YouTube.

In 2022, she founded The Unspeakeasy, a project devoted to fostering viewpoint diversity and free expression among women. From 2022 to 2024 she cohosted, with Sarah Haider, the podcast A Special Place In Hell.

Meghan lives in the Los Angeles area with her Newfoundland dog, Hugo.