Introduction: I’m your host this week, Iona Italia. My guest today is Meghan Daum. Meghan is a lifelong journalist and writer. She is the author of seven books. Her earlier work includes the memoir, Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived In That House, The Unspeakable and Other Subjects of Discussion, and The Problem With Everything: A Journey Through the New Culture Wars. She also gives private writing workshops and runs The Unspeakeasy, “a place where free-range discussion happens among free-thinking women,” which encompasses both online and in person retreats, hangouts and other resources for frank, off-the-record conversations. She is the host of The Unspeakeasy Podcast and some of you probably also know her from A Special Place in Hell, the podcast she co-hosted with Sarah Haider. I’ve long been an admirer of Meghan’s frank, insightful, poetic, and moving work. Today, we’ll be discussing her new essay collection, The Catastrophe Hour. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Meghan Daum.

Essayist and cultural critic Meghan Daum joins Iona Italia to discuss The Catastrophe Hour, her latest collection exploring ageing, solitude, the childfree choice, and the decline of the personal essay. From navigating a housing crisis and losing her home in a wildfire, to grappling with identity politics and the evolution of personal writing in the age of AI, Daum reflects on what it means to grow older in a world that increasingly prioritises content over craft.

Iona Italia: So this is how the collection begins.

For the last five or six years, on many afternoons around 4 or 5 p.m., I’ve been overcome by the feeling that my life is effectively over. This is not a sense that the world is ending, which has been in vogue for quite some time now, and maybe for good reason. It’s a personal foreboding, a distinct feeling of being at the end of my days. My time, while technically not ‘up,’ is disappearing in the rear-view mirror. The fact that this feeling of ambient doom tends to coincide with the blue-tinged, pre-gloaming light of the late afternoon lends the whole thing a cosmic beauty, as devastating as it is awe-inspiring. As such, I’ve dubbed this the catastrophe hour.

Getting older is the oldest story in the world, of course. Still, the time—my time—is disappearing at a pace that is faster than I had ever anticipated and, I daresay, faster than the pace experienced by any previous generation. As far as cultural relevance goes, GenX is shaping up to have a tragically short lifespan. Just as we were finding our footing in the early to mid-2000s, getting real jobs and looking almost like respectable grownups, the twin forces of hyperspeed tech advancement and head-spinning social changes came along and fermented us before we’d even ripened on the vine. By the time we were fifty, many of us were as good as eighty. Or so it often feels to me.

The consolations of ageing have always been in the eye of the beholder. Virginia Woolf, at fifty, wrote in her diaries of feeling “poised to shoot forth quite free, straight and undeflected my bolts whatever they are.” She did not believe in ageing, she said, but rather “forever altering one’s aspect to the sun.” I am now three years past the age Wolf was when she talked about altering her aspect to the sun. And while I don’t know enough about astrology to connect the dots of my memories to trail markers of the earth’s orbit, I’ve lately become aware of a sort of baseline visceral sensation hovering over my emotional life. Again and again, this sensation conjures the same sentiment: I’m glad I lived when I did. Specifically, I’m glad I was young when I was.

Life to me these days often feels like I’m backing up slowly from a tense and increasingly untenable situation. If the world in the post-Trump, post-George-Floyd, post-COVID, post-whatever-happened-five-minutes-ago age feels in many ways like a bank robbery in progress. I’m the lady who was finishing up with the teller at precisely the moment of the robbers entered the building. While the rest of the customers dropped to the ground, I managed to slither away, just in time, my transaction completed, the door hitting me firmly, but not violently on the way out.

It’s a really wonderful introduction that I think captures pretty much all of the main themes of the book. You said just now, when we were talking before the beginning of this recording, that when you’re writing an essay collection, you don’t know what the theme is until afterwards because this is mostly essays that you had already written and published elsewhere, which you’ve collected into this book. So what you had to do, I presume, is go through selecting and then realise what the main themes were and put together an explanation.

How aware were you of this theme of personal ageing and running out of time as you were writing the essays themselves originally? And how did you feel about it when you did realise and discover it?

Meghan Daum: I was vaguely aware of it while I was writing the pieces. The pieces were written over about a ten-year period from 2016 roughly to 2024. I was 46 in 2016. So, you can do the math there. I was definitely thinking about these issues.

When I started to put the book together, I was horrified, reading over this decade’s worth of work, how preoccupied I was with ageing and how when I was 46, I thought I was so old and then I was sitting there at 53, 54 reading this and thinking, “My gosh, what a silly little 46-year-old to be whining about this.” So I was a little bit worried that the book would be too mired in these concerns. But it turns out that this was really my best work.

The book came about because the publisher approached me and they said, “Do you have anything for us?” I wasn’t in a position to write a brand new book for them, start to finish. But I said, “Well, I do have these pieces that I wrote over the last decade that were heavily paywalled and most people didn’t read them. Would you want to put them together?” And they said, “Sure.” So it was really culling through what I had written. And it turned out that the best pieces on a literary level happened to be concerned with ageing.

II: By the way, you and I are exactly the same age. And I have many of the same feelings, which maybe we’ll return to. One way in which I have really noticed it is that I am online dating—which is a horrible experience, but more about that perhaps another time—and I’ve realised that I can no longer say that I’m happy to date a man who’s much older than I am because time at the end above my age is squished, is running out. If I were forty, I might happily date a 55-year-old, but now at 56, I’m not going to date a 71-year-old because he might quickly die on me. And that has given me a strong sense of being squeezed.

MD: Yeah, the exchange rate doesn’t quite work out, right? Because if men in their fifties are increasingly dating even women in their twenties, because the men in their twenties are not really available. So a lot of these young girls, they don’t mind dating much, much older. And what that means is that we would be stuck, we would be needing to date eighty- or ninety-year-olds in order to have the proportion work out there. To each his own, I suppose.

II: Yeah. I briefly joined this dating site for the over fifties. And I think “over fifties” was a bit of an understatement. There were so many guys in their seventies. I have never received so many messages. I opened my inbox after a week and there were about fifty messages there from guys who were keen to meet me.

MD: Well, that must have been an ego boost.

II: I don’t know, all these guys were absolutely geriatric. It was worrying that they even thought of me as within their age range. I quickly left that group again. But yeah, this is an ongoing theme: having just got in at the tail end of something good, particularly as a writer. You have this elegiac sense that comes up again and again in the essays that there is a shift now away from writing and towards content creation, which is very different both in form and also in content, in the kinds of revelations that it leads to. Do you want to talk about that a bit?

MD: Yeah. Like you, I have been podcasting for a while. I started my podcast, The Unspeakable, in 2020, so this is the fifth year. I had always wanted to do a podcast. I loved radio. I love audio content. I always wanted my own talk show when I was a kid. So in some ways, it was a very natural progression, something I was adding. It was not like I stopped writing, obviously. But yeah, I’ve been writing essays. I write everything, personal essays have been my signature form and I’ve been writing them for thirty years or more. And there’s just something about the way they land now with readers and even critics, reviewers, that’s very different.

It’s good and bad. In the past, there was a sense that something was sanctioned. There could be a piece and it might be a little bit unusual or very personal or revealing or complicated or asking the reader to challenge their assumptions a bit or whatever. And it would be presented in a publication that you are familiar with ideally and it would have been edited and copyedited. It was handed to you, handed to the audience in such a way that signalled: take this seriously. We, the gatekeepers of this institution, this publication, take this seriously and deem this worthy of our publication. And so should you. I think that that made for a very different kind of transaction and ability to take risks because your reader is not just left to their own devices. Like, what is this? Is this a blog? Did this person just spit this out this morning and hand this over to me? And certainly, we entered this realm of extremely confessional material—I mean, it’s always been the case, but it really ramped up in the early 2000s into that kind of online media sphere.

And so I guess I just stopped trusting my audience to take what I was saying in the way that I intended it. It makes me really sad to say that. But at the same time, I have to say that the response to this book has been very positive. I’ve been heartened that people do seem to be understanding what I’m trying to do. It may be because the people reading it are mostly my audience and they know what I’m up to anyway. I don’t know how you feel about this, if there’s a difference in the way your work is being received.