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Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum is the author of four books, most recently the collection of original essays The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion (FSG, 2014), and is the editor of the New York Times bestseller Selfish, Shallow & Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not To Have Kids (Picador, 2015). An opinion columnist at the Los Angeles Times for more than a decade, she now writes the Egos column in the New York Times Book Review and has also contributed to the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, and Vogue. She is the recipient of a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and is on the adjunct faculty of the MFA Writing Program at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Daum is currently the Bedell Distinguished Visiting Professor in the University of Iowa’s Graduate Nonfiction Writing Program. Her 2003 novel, The Quality of Life Report, originally published by Viking, has just been reissued by the University of Texas Press.

Author

The Quality Of Life Report by Meghan Daum

The Quality of Life Report, 2017

April 18, 2017 | Essays

At the beginning of this year I drove from New York City to Iowa City, where I had a semester-long post as a visiting professor at the University of Iowa. My midpoint stop was Oberlin, Ohio; an old friend who teaches in the music conservatory at Ober [...]