Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House

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Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House

3.1 of 5 stars 3.10 · rating details · 680 ratings · 188 reviews

From the acclaimed author and columnist: a laugh-out-loud journey into the world of real estate—the true story of one woman’s “imperfect life lived among imperfect houses” and her quest for the four perfect walls to call home.

After an itinerant suburban childhood and countless moves as a grown-up—from New York City to Lincoln, Nebraska; from the Midwest to the West Coast a...more

Hardcover, 245 pages

Published May 4th 2010 by Knopf (first published 2010)

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Jan 19, 2012 Cathy rated it 3 of 5 stars

I enjoyed this book, even though I found the author's attitudes sometimes appalling, sometimes a little too close to home. Meghan Daum, a columnist for the LA Times and a commentator on NPR, writes in exhaustive detail about her many moves and her real estate obsession. I heard her interviewed around the time the book came out, so I knew the gist of the story. As a fellow Gen Xer and cross-country mover, I can relate to the idea that for this generation, where you live says a lot about who you a...more

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Oct 14, 2011 Jennifer rated it 3 of 5 stars

An enjoyable outing from Megham Daum! I liked her style and I liked being inside her head, though a bit more connection between her tale and broader social problems (i.e., the mass real estate hysteria and why that was) would have been good.

Megham Daum spoke at Salem College earlier this week, and now her memoir is the first library book I've checked out via Kindle! Time to get reading....

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Aug 05, 2012 Patty rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2012, mothers-and-daughters, family, dysfunctional-family, non-fiction, new-jersey, new-york, new-york-city, texas, california, nebraska, autobiography, memoir, relationships, self-image, home, home-improvement, los-angeles, women-writers, real-estate, humor

This book crossed my desk at work because it was no longer in our catalog. Never mind the fact that it is non-fiction and none of my concern. It appeared, and once again a book cover caught my attention. So I put it in my pile for the beach.

The cover was still of interest when I started my marathon beach reading and it went in my beach bag. Meghan Daum is a funny, captivating writer, so sitting on the beach with her company was no hardship. I found her story amusing, but also disconcerting. I ju...more

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Jul 01, 2012 Janis Mills rated it 3 of 5 stars

Rather good read. Not a great read. I think I only gave it 3 stars because as with the Live, Pray book I read about a person who has the money to make careless, thoughtless decisions that affect others. Maybe I am envious because I have to be careful and live with the decisions I make. I did identify with the title because I lived in a small town in Massachusetts that was filled with houses far beyond my means. I walked by dog by those houses and thought "oh, life would be so good". In one house...more

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May 09, 2012 Dee rated it 2 of 5 stars

Originally published http://mommydomchronicles.blogspot.co...

I have a confession to make: Meghan and I grew up together. We graduated high school together, and were on the newspaper and yearbook together. For a great number of years she had the writing career I had coveted.

While I am not world famous, or a best seller, or what not, I realized that there was a lot more to my life than hers.

For one thing, I met my true love pretty darn early in my life. He's been sweeping me off my feet since 199...more

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May 06, 2012 Sara rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: emerging-adulthood, memoir, nonfiction

As a member of the recently lamented “slow-to-grow-up” generation of young adults, Meghan Daum has spent her fair share of years living in spare rooms, shared apartments, and rented spaces. But unlike some of her generation, she longs to settle down with property and a house, and so spends the better part of two hundred pages chronicling her journey. At first, Daum is a sympathetic narrator — she describes her childhood games of playing house, pretending to live a frontier life like Laura Ingall...more As a member of the recently lamented “slow-to-grow-up” generation of young adults, Meghan Daum has spent her fair share of years living in spare rooms, shared apartments, and rented spaces. But unlike some of her generation, she longs to settle down with property and a house, and so spends the better part of two hundred pages chronicling her journey. At first, Daum is a sympathetic narrator — she describes her childhood games of playing house, pretending to live a frontier life like Laura Ingalls Wilder, and her parents longing to live in in New York, going so far as to claim to be from NYC despite living twenty miles away in New Jersey. When she goes away to college, choosing Vassar in the hopes of finding the means after graduation to a “shabby yet elegant prewar apartment in Manhattan,” she spends her time dorm-hopping or planning her next move. Astonishingly, after graduation, she manages to, with two of her friends, find said apartment; over the next five years, she goes through seven roommates, and finally “as I grew older and the roommate turnover rate grew higher , the place felt less like a source of emotional and aesthetic ballast than a crash pad I’d mistaken for a permanent resident. Worse, as my cohabitants became younger, my ‘senior roommate’ status began to feel less like a mark of distinction than a big-city version of being a college student who can’t bring himself to graduate even though he’s approaching thirty.” This flowery and dramatic language continues throughout the rest of the narrative, including Daum’s on-again off-again flirtation with the idea of a farm in Nebraska, subletting a condo in Hollywood from a despised woman whose faults include too many cats and candles, her despair over the housing market, and her desperation to appear as an independent, worldly woman who owns a home.

Although the book begins well, Daum’s pathos and constant equating her self with her prospects of home ownership grates after a few chapters. By the end, when she has finally purchased a home and is negotiating sharing the space with her new boyfriend, readers will be exhausted as she continues to moon over other houses and will be glad to get to the pat “home is where the heart is” conclusion. There is plenty to be said about the search for home, about today’s young adults and their delayed settlement into a house, but this book wanders and wonders too much to significantly address these topics.(less)

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Dec 11, 2011 Evelyn rated it 3 of 5 stars

If you're interested in real estate and/or home decorating porn, you'll likely find this book amusing. The author, who grew up with parents who believed that moving was the best way to change your life if you were unhappy, also learned from her parents that the most reliable way to obscure your lower middle class origins and to become, somehow, magically transformed into a sophisticate, was to decorate your home in a way that transmitted who you wished you were rather than what you actually were...more

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Aug 05, 2011 Kristen rated it 2 of 5 stars

I read Daum's essay collection, "My Misspent Youth," and marveled at our similarities, as she dissected the nuances of high school band culture, and the ramifications of labeling and conveying oneself as a shiksa in small-town America, across a number of extremely funny essays. In this book, Daum proposes to examine the obsession with house ownership, which again seemed to fall right in line with my current worldview--having bought my first house less than 2 years ago, I have watched more episod...more

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Jul 07, 2011 Nick rated it 5 of 5 stars

I suspect that I liked this perfectly fluffy book so much because I probably want to be Meghan Daum's friend. It's very funny and very clever. It is the rare piece of fiction, or in this case, memoir, that can entertain me without being heavy on dialogue, which this one isn't. Instead, it's a long series of Daum's musings about her own (and by extension, our culture's) obsession with real estate and what we think it can do for us and say about us. And it is, at every turn, incredibly lucid about...more

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Aug 18, 2010 Kate rated it 3 of 5 stars

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Overall, I liked this book. For about the first half, I really really liked it. In fact, I even felt like I really liked the author as a person, and, as you would a friend, I overlooked/forgave her obsession with finding the perfect place to live. I feel certain her actual friends have all had to make peace with this, and I bet some of them really had to bite their tongues. The author is very likeable, though: she has quite a way with words, and she sheepishly acknowledges her obsession. She com...more Overall, I liked this book. For about the first half, I really really liked it. In fact, I even felt like I really liked the author as a person, and, as you would a friend, I overlooked/forgave her obsession with finding the perfect place to live. I feel certain her actual friends have all had to make peace with this, and I bet some of them really had to bite their tongues. The author is very likeable, though: she has quite a way with words, and she sheepishly acknowledges her obsession. She comes by it naturally: her parents gave her a complicated relationship with dwellings. For example, they moved to NJ, but told friends and relatives that although the mailing address SAYS NJ, they in fact live just outside Manhattan (not true). They even rented a teeny crummy room in NY just to be able to have business cards with a 212 area code--the phone number auto-forwarded to their home in NJ. Around college age, she moved about a dozen times (notably, one building super told her on moving day that she needed "proof of residency" and she somehow ascertained that he meant he wanted $100.) Then she became enamored of rural Nebraska, and had several rentals there. Somewhere in there, she also tried a place in Topanga Canyon, where she witnessed an airlift evac--routine following 911 calls. Around this point in the book, having patiently been along for the ride on many moves, several near-moves, plenty of navel-gazing and opining about houses and the lifestyles she imagined as inextricable from them or included with them, and worst, several descriptions of her real estate disappointments culminating in sobbing, choking, overwraught dismay.
I do give the author credit for sharing even that which makes her sound, quite frankly, ridiculously single-minded and self-indulgent. It had the bizarre effect of seeming like she has a sense of perspective about her utter lack of perspective.
In the meantime, though, it was interesting to read her account of the real estate market in LA around 2004, a couple years before the bubble burst. Obsessed though she was, she wasn't alone in that--indeed, Californians bonded in their preoccupation. She states that it was not uncommon to have to put down earnest money (she gave an example of $30k) just to be permitted to tour the inside of a home! Buyers overlooked all manner of problems in homes--she herself was so glad to find a decent home in her price range, that she didn't flinch at the "uninsurable" lousy garage and other shortcomings.
Having followed her on this arduous journey, I hope that one day she will find the home that feels just right, or be able to let go of the fervent desire for something that always seems just out of reach.(less)

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Aug 09, 2010 K2 ----- rated it 4 of 5 stars

You gotta love a book that makes you laugh out loud and has you search for the author's other books upon completion.

Meghan Daum, a columnist for the LA Times and a commentator on NPR, has the ability to laugh at her real estate obsession. She takes you along for the ride on her many life time moves and a past where her family was always striving for something different throughout her childhood. She pokes fun at her own neurosis and has a delightful writing style.

In her mid-thirties she is convi...more

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Jul 19, 2010 Susan Albert rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: memoir

Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House is the funniest, wittiest book I have read in a very long time. Briskly entertaining and nearly pitch-perfect, Meghan Daum's memoir is the story of her decades-long obsession with unaffordable apartments in New York, unmanageable farms in Nebraska, and houses (suitable and un-) in the suburbs of Los Angeles. It is also the story of too many of us, people whose lives are defined by media-spun dreams of high-class, high-priced, high-maintenance houses...more Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House is the funniest, wittiest book I have read in a very long time. Briskly entertaining and nearly pitch-perfect, Meghan Daum's memoir is the story of her decades-long obsession with unaffordable apartments in New York, unmanageable farms in Nebraska, and houses (suitable and un-) in the suburbs of Los Angeles. It is also the story of too many of us, people whose lives are defined by media-spun dreams of high-class, high-priced, high-maintenance houses that are projections of the selves we long to be and can never quite become. Unless, of course, we are able to find the perfect house, in which our lives would suddenly become perfect.

Daum's house-driven obsession begins in her childhood, with an "alarming fixation" on the pioneer fantasy houses of Little House on the Prairie, fueled by her parents' equally alarming obsession with New York. They don't live there, but they pretend that they do, to the point where her father (who writes musical jingles for a living) maintains a telephone line in a one-room office in Manhattan, which rings through to their suburban Ridgeway, New Jersey house. Her mother (who is driven to decorate the family home as a way of overcoming the "yokelness of her upbringing") tells Midwestern relatives that they live "in the city"—New York, of course. "Two-facedness," Daum says, was the "family crest" and the family weekend getaways are visits to "open houses," as her mother fantasizes about the life she might lead—the person she might be—if she lived in each house.

Daum's troubled relationships to place (her "lifelong housing neuroses") continue through her college years at Vassar (where she majors in English and minors in moving from one dorm room to another) and then through her relocation to New York, where, she believes, she will be able to "slough off" the residue of her mother's and father's disenchantments with who they are and become, finally and triumphantly, her own person, in her very own enchanted place. It doesn't quite work out that way, she discovers as she "rotates" through one roommate after another in an apartment on West 100th Street, then moves to her own apartment. And then—improbably, after writing and selling a novel about a girl who moves to a small town in the Midwest—she relocates again, this time, to Lincoln, NE, where she settles—improbably—on a farm. But (let me be brief here) when her novel is optioned for film, she moves to Los Angeles, accompanied by her large, yak-like sheepdog, Rex, her constant and uncomplaining companion in all her moves. Then back again to Nebraska, where she actually buys a farm, and then back to Los Angeles, where—

But really, you must read this to-and-fro story for yourself, because no summary of it could be nearly as funny as Daum's manic telling of the back-and-forthness of her life. She is at her wittiest when she is making wild (but compassionate) fun of herself and the transient habits which, she says, were her "default setting," and describing the frenzied bubble of the Los Angeles real estate markets of the early 2000s.

If the memoir were just the recitation of Daum's obsession, however, it would not be anything more than a highly entertaining read. What makes this memoir truly and intensely interesting is the writer's insight into her inherited house-habiting angst and her understanding that this desire is woven deeply through our transient culture, dating back (at least) to the constant movements of pioneer families like that of Pa and Ma Ingalls, of Little House fame. Daum is by nature and nurture fickle, she says, a "house slut" who passionately loves houses, lives in them briefly, and then leaves them for other houses, when all the time what she really wants, deeply and painfully, is the perfect home, where she could be perfectly and permanently housed. Such a place would, she writes, confer on her an "I.D. badge for adulthood, for personhood even. It was the only thing that would make me desirable, credible, even human."

Daum's candid description of herself could well be the description of a large segment of the American home-buying public, collectively united in the belief that the perfect house would confer upon them the perfect life. In the early years of this century, the real estate and finance industries conspired to hype this irrational, cultish belief, ratcheting up home prices until they soared into the stratosphere. Realtors and bankers were aided and abetted by the advertising and home decorating industries: "The Home & Garden TV cable channel," Daum writes, offered "a round-the-clock infusion of house porn for wretches like me." As a result, people in search of personhood found themselves in possession of million-dollar houses with adjustable-rate mortgages. These houses quickly sank underwater, leaving their buyers stranded, bankrupt, and (presumably) unpersoned.

Daum's story has a happier ending, for she manages at last to find an almost-suitable Los Angeles bungalow that she can almost afford, one that brings her real life and her ideal life together under one roof. Never mind that it costs nearly half a million dollars, or that the garage resembles the "ruins of Pompeii" and the plumbing was installed during the Coolidge administration. She buys (wisely, on a standard thirty-year mortgage) and begins to remodel. Two years into the process, she meets a man who amiably consents to help her shop for antique drawer-pulls on their first date and eventually becomes her roommate. Now married, she is again contemplating a move—this time, for reasons that have a lasting importance to both of them: "Because the house is not our house, it's my house. It may be my home, but it's not really our home."

This is a book about one woman's lifelong game of house, but it is about also our American obsession with houses, with the dream of owning something that will transform us into the persons we dream of becoming. But as Daum says, maybe owning the perfect house (which seems so difficult to so many) is actually easy, when the "hard part is learning how to hold the title to your very existence, to own not only property, but also your life." (less)

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Jul 18, 2010 Amy M rated it 3 of 5 stars

I loved the title of this book! I too, have moved a lot....although I lived in the same house the first 18 years of my life, in my five years of college I lived in two dormrooms and six apartments, with a total of more than 15 roommates. In my mid-twenties I had five more roommates, two apartments and two townhomes. I moved to Chicago in my late 20's, and in my two years there I lived in an apartment, and then bought a house (all with the same person). Then it was off for a two-year stint in Dal...more

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May 23, 2010 Chris rated it 5 of 5 stars

In "Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House," Meghan Daum recounts her search for a living space that would allow her to feel at home. In part, she declares, that quest has to do with houses, "ones I've lived in and ones I haven't, ones I've lusted for, ones I've reviled, ones I've left too soon, and ones where I've found myself stuck, chained to my own radiator by the tethers of my own stupid decisions." Yet as she moves in and out of temporary residences, never quite coming across the o...more In "Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House," Meghan Daum recounts her search for a living space that would allow her to feel at home. In part, she declares, that quest has to do with houses, "ones I've lived in and ones I haven't, ones I've lusted for, ones I've reviled, ones I've left too soon, and ones where I've found myself stuck, chained to my own radiator by the tethers of my own stupid decisions." Yet as she moves in and out of temporary residences, never quite coming across the one that would complete her, she finds herself "hungry to the point of weakness for something that would root me to the earth." Eventually, she does discover such a house and tries to transform it into a dream home, at which point her story begins to read like an illustration of the adage that when God wants a laugh, he answers our prayers.

Setting obviously plays a large role in the book, and Daum offers plenty of dwelling details without letting things degenerate into an episode of "Trading Spaces." Whether a Vassar dorm room, a prewar apartment on the Upper West Side, a Nebraska farmhouse or an Echo Park house on a hill, each place she has lived is richly drawn. Daum, a weekly Op-Ed columnist for the Los Angeles Times, deftly captures the emotions of relocation: "the suspension of disbelief required to pull out of a driveway that is no longer yours, coast through a neighborhood that will soon no longer be home, and pass … the landmarks that … have long been the only thing standing between disorientation and sweet familiarity. No one ever talks about the importance of staring straight ahead while making this exit.… Like breaking up with a lover, you need to be as gracious as possible, but even more so you just need to walk out."

Much of "Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House" takes place when Daum is single, but she has no intention of succumbing to "the tragedy of the single woman who won't buy decent furniture because she's waiting to get married." Instead, she takes the dangerously clichéd premises that surround a single woman looking to buy a house and carefully prunes away the same old stories. Some of what she confronts, however, is fascinating in its archaism. When her house is in escrow, she is required to sign half the forms as "Meghan Daum, an unmarried woman."

Still, the metaphor of romance makes perfect sense in the context of real estate. "Moving, like chocolate and sunshine," Daum writes, "stirs up many of the same chemicals you ostensibly produce when you're in love.… Like a new lover, a new house opens a floodgate of anticipation and trepidation and terrifying expectations fused with dreamy distractions." Beyond these particulars, Daum captures the now-gone moment when real estate became a national obsession: "The whole world, or at least the whole country, was buying real estate and melting it down to liquid form and then injecting it into veins." She chronicles the shared madness of those who could only take breaks from watching HGTV to discuss closing costs.

At times, "Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House" reads a bit like an addiction memoir. Like many addictive tendencies, Daum's has roots in childhood. She describes her family as possessed by "a chronic, lulling sensation of being aboard a train that was perpetually two stops away from the destination we had in mind for ourselves," always contemplating "what possibilities for happiness might lie at the destination point of a moving van."

As she moves from coast to coast and in between, Daum is consistently relatable. In the end, she settles in Los Angeles, which is, she explains, "nothing if not the geographical equivalent of Baby Bear's porridge: not too cold, not too hot, but, rather, a study in the unsung pleasures of lukewarm." Her descriptions of the neighborhoods north of downtown — Silver Lake, Echo Park, Angelino Heights — are meticulous enough to play Name That Intersection, and the details of her house-hunting will please local readers.

There's a sense that once a perfect home is established, we suddenly become functional adults. "I knew it wasn't just a house I was after," Daum writes, "but, rather, proof of my existence. It was the only thing that would make me desirable, credible, even human." As she moves from house-lusting to house-buying, and, shortly thereafter, to sharing a home with a partner, she struggles with the idea that she doesn't want to live with someone so much as to have a witness to the beauty of her home. Daum's discomfort with coming around to the reality of shared space is honest and endearing and somehow captured in this moment. Her boyfriend moves in and they put the spare mattress out on the lawn for pick-up, in the same 24-hour period that the Google Earth satellite photographs her home for virtual eternity.

Originally reviewed for the LA Times - May 9, 2010(less)

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May 16, 2010 Carolyn Hill rated it 4 of 5 stars

This book is a wonderful confessional for a house-a-holics anonymous, if there was such a thing. Coping with the addiction myself, I found the book not so much revelatory as relatable. No, I haven't had the compulsion to continually move like the author did, but I certainly find myself surfing the MLS listings when I'm not in the market to buy and studying the shelter magazines ad nauseam. If you've ever fantasized about living in that certain house down to how you'd decorate and furnish it, or...more

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Mar 10, 2011 Glenn rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: memoir

Very boring. At one point the author talks about booting a male roommate named Brad out of a New York City apartment, partly because he "recounted his college days in excrutiating--and mind-numbing--detail." That sums up how I felt while plodding through this memoir. Like the author stating that "Brad grew both more irritated and more irritating by the day.", I grew more irritated page by page. It was almost like reading 30+ years of selected mundane Facebook postings. e.g. She bought a futon an...more

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May 11, 2010 Ronit rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: memoir

Funny, wry and heartfelt, Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House is not your typical addiction memoir. There are no drugs, decidedly no sex, and too many references to Suzanne Vega to evoke the crude impulse of rock 'n roll. But Daum’s hilarious retelling of her real estate obsession is as compelling as any binge book. Her story begins with a glance back at her mother, who used her skills at interior design as a means of escaping her rural roots—eventually leading her to purchase a small...more

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Jun 04, 2011 Charlotte rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: library-book

http://charlotteswebofbooks.blogspot....

Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived In That House is about a young woman who has restlessly moved from rental house to rental house while moving back and forth from California to Lincoln, Nebraska. She finally takes the big plunge in the shark infested waters of Los Angeles real estate. Let me just say that for what Meghan Daum paid for her hovel in LA - would have bought her a mansion in Wyoming. For real. But, having lived in Lincoln, she knew that when she...more

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Jun 20, 2010 christa rated it 4 of 5 stars

In the early 2000s, Meghan Daum did something totally unprecedented. She busted past a bunch of dead male authors with flapper fetishes and Margaret Atwood to land a spot in my Top 5 Favorite Books of All Time list with her collection of contemporary essays: "My Misspent Youth."

It's not a Pulitzer Prize-winning mix; There is a good chance you've never heard of it. But is a real gem, with pieces on the financial woes of residual college tuition and renting in New York City on a freelance writer'...more In the early 2000s, Meghan Daum did something totally unprecedented. She busted past a bunch of dead male authors with flapper fetishes and Margaret Atwood to land a spot in my Top 5 Favorite Books of All Time list with her collection of contemporary essays: "My Misspent Youth."

It's not a Pulitzer Prize-winning mix; There is a good chance you've never heard of it. But is a real gem, with pieces on the financial woes of residual college tuition and renting in New York City on a freelance writer's income, and another memorable bit where she likens the idea of carpeting to a gross kid from elementary school. She's funny, the way you want funny to be: subtle, conversational, doled out in moderation. And she was recognizable. It wasn't my life she was writing about, but it was a life I recognized.

[Unfortunately she followed this with fiction that smacked dangerously close to her own life: Woman ditches out on the fast lane, lands in Lincoln, Neb., meets a dude in a flannel shirt and lives in an old farmhouse. And in the process learns a thing or two about love. It was a total three-star meh-fest.]

Daum is back doing what should be doing, conversational nonfiction writing, with what is ultimately an essay-ish love letter to house shopping and the places where she has lived, "Life Would be Perfect If I Live in that House."

Daum's fascination with all-things-home gets an organic start, with her mother dragging her to open houses on the weekends. When she goes off to college, she averages more than one move per school-year: Dorm rooms, attics, summer apartments in the city. She follows a hankering for space to Nebraska and falls in love with old farmhouses. Then it's off to Los Angeles, back to Nebraska, Los Angeles again. Rentals, dog-sitting gigs, and eventual ownership.

In a world filled with books about lipstick, high heels, and vampires, Daum's motivation is solely for a fixer-upper that she can mold into something that totally mirrors who she is. She cared less about her own appearance, she admits, that the appearance of the space where she was living. At one point she postpones a second date until she moves into her new place. And sometimes this causes a crisis of identity:

"It was the dirty truth about my relentless search for 'domestic integrity.' It was this awful fact: you cannot pursue authenticity at the same time you are pursuing fabulousness. You cannot have it both ways. You cannot be the down-home farm girl and the queen of lower Fifth Avenue at the same time. You cannot be Maggie O'Connell (the floatplane-piloting, pixie-haircut-sporting, flannel-shirt-wearing cutie from 'Northern Exposure') and also Carrie Bradshaw from 'Sex and the City.' You cannot be Dorothy Parker and also Willa Cather. To attempt to be both of these things is to be not only neither, but in fact nothing.

It is a niche topic, a different sort of addiction memoir, and very much a risk. If I didn't know Meghan Daum's writing, I'm not sure this book would ever leap off the shelf and into my hot hands. But it did, and Daum, for my money, remains one of the best voices in modern essay writing.

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Aug 15, 2010 Monica rated it 4 of 5 stars

Not sure how I wound up reading two books about house buying obsession in L.A. this month (this and This is Where We Live by Janelle Brown), since I'm not particularly interested in the topic myself. However, the request function at the library works in mysterious ways, and these both came up one after the other. I picked up Daum's book because I'd enjoyed her earlier series of essays (My Misspent Youth) and wanted to see what happened to her after she left New York. However, I have to say that...more

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Jun 17, 2010 Katie rated it 4 of 5 stars

Meghan Daum wrote the exact book I wanted/needed to read right now! Though I'm not shopping for real estate, I am about to leave a city (the only city besides Carbondale, Illinois, that in the book she disparages) for another city (my fourth in less than ten adult years, not counting college) for no better reason than that, from a distance, this one 'seems more me' and is allegedly somewhere 'I could see myself staying for a while.' I envision the perfect rental bungalow there, though I don’t kn...more

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May 28, 2010 Becky rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: did-not-finish

I don't know why - perhaps because I recognize Meghan Daum's name from magazine articles she wrote in the early '90s - I expected this memoir to be more fluff than it is. I was actually pleasantly surprised by the analysis she applies to her upbringing by intellectually striving, but immutably middle-class parents. I won't deny that part of my attraction to at least the early part of the book is because of its similarity to my story - well, my parents' anyway. I find it very interesting to read...more

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Jan 09, 2013 Caitlin rated it 4 of 5 stars

My family moved constantly when I growing up, so I thought this was an interesting look at how always being on the move as a child affects you as an adult. I could identify with her crazy-making, overwhelming desire to put down roots even as she undermined herself by moving all the time. This is the only book I've come across that looks at the 'something better awaits me in the next city' mindset that seeps into you when you are dragged around as a child and end up being an adult who's not reall...more

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Jan 30, 2011 Melody rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: memoir

I recently read an article that questioned the current trend of everyone penning a memoir. This book, to me, exemplified said trend. A memoir about real estate? I picked it up for the clever title, which now strikes me as the best thing about the book. It would have made a delightful magazine article. There were amusing passages, to be sure, and Daum is a competent writer but there's not enough here, or too much.

The author's endless fascination with her own reactions to parquet and hexagonal ti...more

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Oct 04, 2011 Liralen rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction, 2011, reviewed, houses

I saw this at the bookstore and was sure it would be my kind of book -- although I don't quite share the author's wanderlust (for lack of a better term), I'm definitely familiar with the thought (delusion) that, if I lived in that house over there (or that one there, or that apartment, or in that city), life would be perfect. It's not so much about the house itself -- it's about the life that the house implies.

But Daum doesn't really go into the meaning behind this need for the 'perfect' house,...more

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Feb 27, 2011 JoAnn/QuAppelle rated it 2 of 5 stars

I can't believe I finished this self-indulgent book. I guess I kept waiting for it to live up to its press and get better. Finally, about halfway through, I started skimming. In my opinion, it was much ado about nothing. Daum seems to have had an idea for a magazine article and somehow boringly expanded it into a book.

There was too much "inner thinking" and stream-of-consciousness writing ---- and so much of it was repetitive. I just did not care about her house yearnings and grew impatient wit...more

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Jun 29, 2010 Laurel-Rain rated it 5 of 5 stars

Meghan Daum’s memoir "Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House" leads the reader on a journey toward finding the perfect dwelling. From apartments in NY brownstones to farmhouses in Nebraska, and westward to cottages in LA, the author describes her obsessive quest for the house that’s just out of reach.

Some people have hobbies like collecting, but Ms. Daum admits that searching for just the right neighborhood, redecorating each home so that she is finally authentically herself, became an u...more

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Jun 05, 2010 Lauren rated it 4 of 5 stars

"When I think back on the places I've lived, I now wonder this: I wonder if the real measure of 'home' is the degree to which you can leave it alone. Maybe appreciating a house means knowing when to stop decorating. Maybe you've never really lived there until you've thrown its broken pieces in the garbage. Maybe learning how to be out in the big world isn't the epic journey everyone thinks it is. Maybe that's actually the easy part. The hard part is what's right in front of you. The hard part is...more

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Oct 29, 2010 Liza rated it 3 of 5 stars

My friend Ralph recommended this book to me, mainly because the author is a Vassarite, but probably also because he knows about my proclivity for moving. Maybe he doesn't realize that I'm slightly panicked that I've become settled in New York and daydream about moving (Southwestern England? Berlin? Perhaps New Mexico would be interesting?) constantly.

I love this author in that she's very self-aware about her real estate neuroses without having that whole annoyingly ironic self-awareness. She di...more

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Jun 17, 2010 Jane rated it 4 of 5 stars

In 1999 Meghan Daum wrote an article for the New Yorker in which she was positively rhapsodic about her move from New York City to Lincoln, Nebraska. But she didn't stay long. So I was anxious to see how Nebraska fared in this book about first her family's and then her own quest for the perfect home. She's still very positive about her time in Nebraska and harkened back to it often. But as she said she couldn't be "both Dorothy Parker and Willa Cather" so after three years she decided to continu...more

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About Meghan Daum

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 publi...more

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“Also, I was coming up on my five year anniversary of owning the house, and if there's anything I've learned in five years, it's this: if a piece of your house falls off and you don't know what to do with it, throwing it in the trash and forgetting about it is a perfectly viable option.” — 3 people liked it

“Maybe learning how to be out in the big world isn't the epic journey everyone thinks it is. Maybe that's actually the easy part. The hard part is what's right in front of you. The hard part is learning how to hold the title to your very existence, to own not only property, but also your life.” — 2 people liked it

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