The Catastrophe Hour: Selected Essays

by Meghan Daum

'For the last five or six years, on many afternoons around 4 or 5 p.m., I've been overcome with the sensation that my life is effectively over. Note the personal touch here. This is not a sensation of the world ending, which has been in vogue for quite some time now, and maybe for good reason. It's a distinct feeling of being at the end of my days. My time, while technically not "up", is disappearing in the rearview mirror. The fact that this feeling of ambient doom tends to coincide with the blue-tinged, pre-gloaming light of the late afternoon lends to the whole thing a cosmic beauty, as devastating as it is awe-inspiring. As such, I've dubbed this the catastrophe hour.' Showcasing her wit, intellect and her uncanny ability to throw new light on the most ubiquitous of subjects, these essays are classic Daum. Delving into divorce, dating, music, friendship, beauty, aging, death and money, Daum's unflinching honesty and exacting observations secure her reputation as one of our most important and enduring essayists.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction

200 pages, Paperback

Published April 15, 2025

About the author

Meghan Daum is the author of Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived In That House, a personal chronicle of real estate addiction and obsessive fascination with houses, as well as the novel The Quality of Life Report and the essay collection My Misspent Youth. Since 2005 she has written a weekly column for The Los Angeles Times, which appears on the op-ed page every Thursday. She has contributed to public radio's Morning Edition, Marketplace and This American Life and has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, Harper's, GQ, Vogue, Self, New York, Travel & Leisure, BlackBook, Harper's Bazaar, The Village Voice, and The New York Times Book Review.

Equal parts reporter, storyteller, and satirist, Meghan has inspired controversy over a range of topics, including social politics, class warfare and the semiotics of shag carpet. She has been widely praised in the press and elicits particular enthusiasm from Amazon.com customer reviewers, who have hailed her work as everything from "brilliant and outrageously funny" to "obnoxious, arrogant, rambling dribble," (sic). Meghan's work is included in dozens of college textbooks and anthologies, including The KGB Bar Reader, Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times, and The New Gilded Age: The New Yorker Looks at the Culture of Affluence.

Born in California in 1970, Meghan was raised primarily on the east coast and is a graduate of Vassar College and the MFA writing program at Columbia University's School of the Arts. She spent several years in New York City before making her now-infamous move to Nebraska in 1999, where she continued to work as an essayist and journalist and wrote The Quality of Life Report. Meghan has taught at various institutions, including California Institute for the Arts, where she was a visiting artist in 2004 and taught graduate nonfiction writing. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Alan Zarembo, and their sheepdog, Rex

Reviews

[Violeta · Rating 4 out of 5]

"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 this phrase resonates, and if (like the author and myself) you are in that phase of life (mid-50s to mid-60s) that, although you don’t exactly feel old, you realize that " being not-old isn’t the same as having a long stretch ahead of you," then this collection of personal essays by an author who doesn’t shy away from expressing her personal truths and observations on the culture right now will keep you interested and entertained. A few of the issues she touches on were a little too foreign to a non-American like me, but her intelligent musings on aging, friendship, dating, real estate, social media, beauty, death and money really hit home.

Apparently, ever since the publication of her last book, The Problem with Everything, she has been (in her own words) “somewhat non grata in certain literary circles” and I am glad to see she has found a new home with an independent British publisher, Notting Hill Editions. It’s reassuring to know that in the era of cancel culture, there is room for bright minds who dare express opinions that sometimes slightly deviate from the…unofficially official line of the big publishing houses. Ms Daum is too good a writer to be homeless.

[Travis]

I’ve been a big fan of Meghan Daum ever since she published “My Misspent Youth” in the New Yorker. That essay managed to be funny and relatable at the same time that it engaged with a topic (money) that felt almost verboten. Other pieces of hers that I have loved include her essay (also in the New Yorker) about the decision not to have children as well as the longer piece she wrote about the period leading up to her mother’s death. There is humor in her writing, but also a certain frankness that makes it easy to trust her as a narrator.

I enjoyed this new collection of essays, but am not sure that any of them rise to the level of her best work. Many feel underdeveloped, as though she had a germ of an idea that she was not able to fully flesh out. That said, I flew through the book and probably could have read it in a single sitting. Reading it felt like having a conversation with a close friend; the time passed quickly, and I was having fun, even if things didn’t get too deep.

[Jonathan Maas · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 stars, but still a Catastro-Me hour

All right, this was great. Like a favorite sports team I get to be a bit more critical of this favorite book than the rest, so first -

Why it is good
It's great. Read it.

My issue, which will take up most of this review haha

The issue I have is that every essay is self-centered. The world begins and ends with Megan, and though it is cynical and sardonic, I just wish it weren't so self-centered. Take these two books:

Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
South and West: From a Notebook

The former is a book of essays that takes all the fun out of lobster festivals, the second takes all the fun out of the South.

And yet, they were not about David Foster Wallace or Joan Didion .

The Catastrophe Hour: Selected Essays is about Meghan Daum .

Every essay begins and ends with her. There are global themes of course, but everything revolves around her universe, how she feels, what is going on with her, and that is it.

This is not an exploration of lobster festivals or the South, even a sardonic one, but how lobster festivals or the South impacted her, and her alone.

In the age of influencers and me culture online, this is about her and her alone.

But f**k it, it's still pretty good and I recommend the s**t out of it
All right, one part struck a nerve - but its great. Petulant 5 star review over.

She writes well, and I kept turning the pages. And I still got a lot out of it.

I highly recommend it!

[Adria · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s hard to write a review about this book because I enjoyed reading it, but it was also bland and not very interesting. Minutes after finishing it, I can’t remember anything she wrote about, except for losing money on a real estate venture.

As we age, we only become significant and relevant to the people whose lives we invested in. If you’ve only invested in yourself, then you become important only to yourself. This is not a condemnation of Daum. She approaches this fact with truth and grace and a little bit of humor. But I think that’s where the book falls flat. A life invested only in the self is boring. It’s a story that doesn’t need to be written, or read for that matter.

[Betsy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Middle age (mid-50s) does appear to be a catastrophe for intrepid observer/essayist Meghan Daum who now strikes me as an oddly contented troubled soul. But she takes aging, singledom, and childfree life in stride and has interesting observations about the changing reality for people who opt to write for a living.

[Carolyn Bowman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved these essays for their truthfulness and look and our insane culture today. As an author, I identified with so much.

[Barry Galef · Rating 5 out of 5]

Getting to Know an Intriguing Individual

Ms. Daum is living the examined life, and this book of essays lets us peek at it over her shoulder. Her prose crackles, her perspectives on life (her own, and everyone else’s) make you think and review all the choices you have made. I read this over the course of about two days, and was sorry to see it end.
Brava!

[Giovanni García-Fenech · Rating 3 out of 5]

When writing about herself, Daum is consistently good, and at times brilliant. But when she turns to contemporary culture, she veers uncomfortably close to manosphere territory. She admits to spending ten hours a day online, much of it on Twitter, and replacing music with podcasts, and it shows. Pity.

[reading is my hustle · Rating 3 out of 5]

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 rearview 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.

most of these essays are about how to live with yourself in this current moment.

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this collection of essays. am intrigued by Megan Daum- so smart and yet always seems to be defending her life choices perhaps like everyone would.

I just read an article by her today writing about how she lost everything in the Palisades Fire- she seems to be allowing herself to grieve. We are of the same age and loss and grief seem to be more present in middle age. I appreciate her giving a voice to it.

[Crabbygirl · Rating 4 out of 5]

a series of personal essays that I read slowly over the summer. some great turn of phrases and insights.

I hear the personal essay is dead because people are overly personal online all the time, so no one is having the ah-ha moments of seeing themselves in an article. or maybe, like the author admits, it's a phase you give up as you get older. only the young and confident can mine their lives for content like there's an infinite wellspring.

[Karen Grunsfeld · Rating 2 out of 5]

She spends SO much time talking about how happy and relieved she is to be childless and alone, but she just comes off as a depressed and lost person. She focuses a lot on death and not being young and attractive anymore. I didn’t see much hope or anticipation for the future. Definitely not uplifting in any way and actually quite sad. Like this woman needs a lot of therapy.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've loved all of Meghan's books, and this was no exception. She is one of the few writers I have stayed interested in for 20+ years. I also love her podcast. Every essay in The Catastrophe Hour was enjoyable, intelligent, and well written. I wasn't ready for the book to end.

[Ally Silas · Rating 3 out of 5]

i enjoyed reading this and flew through it fairly quickly, but it seemed a bit bland. i rarely found myself lost in her stories, and i’m not sure how much of this i’ll even remember. i enjoy personal essays, narcissistic or not. i would like to learn how to write them.

[Bob · Rating 5 out of 5]

The “Femcel Cope” essay in particular is bravura.

[Marcio Hack · Rating 5 out of 5]

The greatest living essayist.

[Roo · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very readable selection of searching, personal essays, and a suitable introduction to Meghan as an author.

[Carlton Moore · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The writer will be grateful to have lived and worked in the era that she did. She caught the tail end of the personal age and squeezed out every last drop. She even stayed past closing time."

[Debs · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75 stars

Refreshing to read essays by a woman wholly uninterested in marrying or having children, who has created her own life to fit her specific desires.