There is something wonderfully vindicating about reading Meghan Daum's essays, which is why I've read many of them three or four times. She pinpoints so many of the lies we tell ourselves and each other, combining brutal honesty with graceful, witty prose. A fascinating and compelling read.

meghan daum is scarily perceptive, outrageously talented, and ridiculously funny. I read the essays in one afternoon and haven't stopped thinking about them since. Though other reviewers found her arrogant, i think they are mistaking her honesty for snobbery, and her obvious intelligence for disdain. Yes, she makes fun of other people (carpet owners, sci-fi geeks, and high school musicians in particular) but gets away with it because she allows us glimpses into her own carpet-owning, sci-fi-reading, oboe-playing geeky soul. If you think personal essays have to either be truncated memoirs or shrill polemics, read this book and enjoy the form at its finest.

After reading just one essay by Meghan Daum when it first appeared in The New Yorker, coincidentally the title piece of MY MISSPENT YOUTH, I wanted more, more, more of her prose. So I was understandably thrilled when a recent web search turned up this first collection of her work and, having read it, I am even more thrilled. She is really, really good. She's so good, she's scary. Daum's pieces share in common what she calls a point, which someone else bent on stuffy superlatives might call an overarching theme. Either way, she's not imposing some pat formula on life but has pulled out a bona fide truth about the human condition in its many different circumstances, that we simultaneously operate in two worlds, one a concoction of dreams, prejudices and cultural conditioning, the other, reality. Each of her essays is a moment of reckoning, of understanding how the imagined world has tipped the real one, of having to bow to the real one. In unflinching prose that just sweeps along, she pursues truth as a player, occasionally as a witness. The quality of her work reminds me of what Carol Burnett said about having no choice but to become the star because she was a misfit in the chorus: Daum, incapable of following through on requests that she submit to puppy mill essaying on Gen-X preoccupations (she's about 31), has positioned herself in the territory of Joan Didion and our finest cultural commentators.

Faced with losing her apartment and the meaninglessness of her job, Lucinda Trout abandons the superficialness, craziness, and expense of NCY and moves to a small city in the midwest. She brings her career with her via freelance assignments, rents an apartment, and begins to socialize with the locals in search of "quality life."

Of course, as anyone who is not a NY writer in her late 20's knows, it isn't that easy. Lucinda's first spacious apartments stinks and has fleas, she finds the conversations of her new friends shallow, her boyfriend is a meth addict with 3 children with 3 different women, and she takes up drinking cheap grocery store wine.

The Quality of Life report veers from being laugh out loud funny, sad in its exposure of unrealized dreams, and frustrating in that the self centered and condescending lead character can't quite pull the reader all the way into her story.

Although readable, this book is disappointing. It could have been so much more, but is too rife with stereotypes, thin characters, and self involvement to do the storyline justice.

I just finished Meghan Daum's Quality of Life Report--a novel about a young single woman in New York who relocates to the midwest for some good and some not so good reasons. The novel is overall, very good, but does have a few flaws. First off, before you read it, be prepared, it is a satire and as such makes fun of all of the characters--and not just the midwesterners as some have pointed out here. All of the New York characters are skewered, some mercilessly. It works very well as a satire--it's funny, witty and will bring a smile to your face, if not out and out laughter. The story is also believable. 30 year old Lucinda is sent to Prairie City on assignment from the news program she works for and, because the rent on her apartment has skyrocketed astronomically and she fell in love with Prairie City, she convinces her bosses to let her stay for a year and do some on location features. The job quickly fades into the background as she settles into life in Prairie City. She becomes involved with one of the locals--and their relationship soon becomes the focal point of the novel. This is not "chick lit" in that it's a novel where the heroine dates the bad guy first and winds up with the good guy after hilarious and wacky antics. There is no fairy tale ending here--this is more of a realistic, satirical take on American people today. I did find fault with some of the character development--some of them were so flat they did belong in a chick lit novel--however, most had rings of truth to them. The novel does at times suffer from an identity crisis. Does it want to be a satirical look at life in America--or is it a more introspective look at one young woman's fictional life? All in all, though, this novel makes for interesting and entertaining reading.

The Quality of Life Report is one of those books that make eating and sleeping seem like annoying distractions. I became completely absorbed in this book and fell in love with its heroine, Lucinda Trout. Lucinda is a New York television reporter who abandons her shallow job (she reports on thong underwear and takeout sushi) and her overpriced mouse-infested apartment in search of the "good life" in the Midwest. But she soon discovers that her new home doesn't live up to her Norman Rockwell fantasies. This greatly distresses the bosses and stylists back home in New York, who insist that the "Quality of Life Reports" that Lucinda files present only the Hallmark version of the Great Plains.

The book is stunningly honest, which is what makes it such a compelling read. It also presents a complicated and nuanced view of the Midwest that New Yorkers like myself would do well to see. But what really made me tear though this book was Lucinda herself. Like many of my favorite female protagonists, she is funny, smart and self-deprecating. But Lucinda has something more -- she has a level of confidence, bravery and independence that I often see in my friends but rarely see in fiction. Highly recommended.