THE PROBLEM WITH EVERYTHING

A New York Times Notable Book

A New York Post Top Ten Book 

" . . a lifeline thrown to those of us who feel like we’re drowning in nonsense.” — Geoff Dyer on his favorite books of 2019, in LitHub

In the fall of 2016, acclaimed author Meghan Daum began working on a book about what she saw as some of the excesses and contradictions of contemporary feminism. With Hillary Clinton soon to be elected, she figured even the most fiercely liberal of her friends and readers could take the criticisms in stride. But after the election, she knew she needed to do more, and her nearly completed manuscript began to undergo a major transformation. What emerged in its place is the most sharply-observed, all-encompassing, and unputdownable book of her career.

In this gripping new work, Meghan examines our country’s most intractable problems with clear-eyed honesty instead of exaggerated outrage. With passion, humor, and most importantly nuance, she tries to make sense of the current landscape—from Donald Trump’s presidency to the #MeToo movement and beyond. In the process, she wades into the waters of identity politics and intersectionality, thinks deeply about notions of personal resilience, and tests a theory about the divide between Gen Xers and millennials.

This signature work may well be the first book to capture the essence of this era in all its nuances and contradictions. No matter where you stand on its issues, this book will strike a chord.

Advance praise for The Problem With Everything

This book is the eloquent testament of a card-carrying feminist who abhors the stranglehold that political correctness has placed on intellectual life in America. As such, it is to be applauded—and I do. —Vivian Gornick, author of Fierce Attachments and The Odd Woman And the City

Just when you thought feminist iconoclasm had gone into retreat or extinction, The Problem With Everything arrives, slicing through the intellectual murk of outrage culture and edgy online wokeness. Daum is a virtuoso at rueful insights and self-interrogation, willing to risk upending things in the knowledge that ‘safe spaces’ and safe ideas advance none of us. —Laura Kipnis, author of Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus

The Problem with Everything has the brutal honesty and rawness that will leave you examining your own thoughts and beliefs about the culture we are living in today. It forces you to ask yourself the question: whose side am I really on, and why do I have to choose one? I love how this book pushes me to think harder and be smarter. —Chelsea Handler, author of Life Will Be The Death of Me . . . and you, too!

Meghan Daum's brilliant, captivating, and infuriating new book examines the fault lines between the feminism of her own Generation X and that of millennials. As I read The Problem With Everything, I occasionally paused to reconsider some of my own most closely-held truths, to yell out loud at the author, and--most of all--to admire her scorching wisdom and wit. Unsettling, urgent, and amazing. —Jennifer Finney Boylan, author of She’s Not There and Long Black Veil

Meghan Daum's observations will stand in the future as a perfect encapsulization of how social media has transformed educated people's sense of what it is to be moral in the 2010s. More to the point, this book shines a light on us right now, a brighter and more revealing one than anything in the Twittersphere." — John McWhorter, author of Words On The Move and The Language Hoax

Meghan Daum has a world-class BS detector. In elegant, incisive, often hilarious prose, she calmly applies it to the confusion and narcissism threatening so many of our most feverish, social media-driven debates. From the shifting terms of “fourth-wave” feminism to the paradoxes of privilege and the myopia of tribalism, The Problem with Everything probes a liberalism under assault from all fronts and in danger of falling apart from within. Nothing escapes Daum’s scrutiny—least of all herself. — Thomas Chatterton Williams, author of Self-Portrait In Black And White: Unlearning Race

Available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Powell's Books.