Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House, by M. Daum

I came across an article by LA Times columnist Meghan Daum. She wrote about being a childless woman {+}. Here was a successful, smart, married woman authoring a thoughtful, positive, non-preachy opinion piece about a topic that even twenty years ago, would have marginalized her. It was awesome. I discovered this article after listening to a radio interview she had given last year. She was well-spoken and articulate. Her pitch was light, her tone feminine, but her voice, I picked up immediately on a nervous energy. Her speech raced through thoughts packaged in large, rambling sets of words. And yet, her thoughts were neither unstructured nor without direction. I found it curious that the voice over the radio waves conflicted with the sure, confident tone of the article I had read. It made me want to read her books. I selected her most recent, published in 2010 by Knopf, Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House.

I absorbed Daum's serious and silly memoir flabbergasted at how much I could relate. I came across so many lines that could have been lifted straight out of my brain. So uncanny they were that I even re-read some paragraphs, finding it difficult to believe how parallel her tale ran to my own current narrative. I spent my entire afternoon with the book. I would pick it up again around midnight, only turning in after I finished the last page at three in the morning.

The quote above makes it seem like this book is a wacky tale of a depressed woman, but it is not. I chose it because it was the first line that made me take pause. I caught my breath, finding great comfort in the knowledge that someone I had never met, and will probably never meet, had written down words that so amply encompassed everything I'd been feeling. There is greatness in that. Daum's story is full of humor, if not embedded in her somewhat neurotic tendencies, but that is exactly what made it feel very real. Deep thinkers often hyper-process information, overthinking the most mundane of events. It is this very habit that makes their stories entertaining and never anything less than honest.

If you have a sense of humor, and / or are in your late twenties or early thirties, and / or find yourself in a spot where you don't want to be, I think you could relate to Life Would Be Perfect. If I may make a suggestion, avoid sitting on a bench for five consecutive hours reading it. That boney part in the center of each of your butt cheeks? My bum's so sore today, I can't sit on a chair without a cushion.