My Misspent Youth
by Meghan Daum
Open City

As a rule of thumb, it's good to avoid books composed of what were once discrete articles published in various glossy magazines. Some writers can pull off the transition — Janet Malcolm and John McPhee have ably translated long articles into books. But Meghan Daum is heir to neither of these luminaries.

The 10 essays in this collection were drawn from impressive sources — Harper's, the New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review and others — yet they feel a great deal lighter than material you'd associate with those venerable publications. "On the Fringes of the Physical World," an essay reprinted from the New Yorker, once may have been deemed sufficiently charming by Tina Brown, but from today's vantage point this recounting of the author's experiment in Internet dating is dated and embarrassingly personal. It's the kind of piece you'd expect to see in a magazine that emphasizes the personalities of its writers, like Jane.

Daum writes well, though, and it's easy to see how quickly she could have established a successful career, which she recounts in a few of the more autobiographical pieces here. These pieces are an instructive look at a successful young woman, but Daum cannot seem to decide if she wants to romanticize her life as a young writer in the big city or if she wants to assume a world-weary pose and instruct her readers on where she went wrong.

The contradiction doesn't offend; it's the essays that explore this contradiction that are the most honest and enjoyable. "Publishing and Other Near Death Experiences," which should be required reading for every senior English major from Bowdoin to Pomona, is a cautionary tale about the romance and realities of entry-level work in book publishing. The title essay is similarly skewed and equally charming. Daum does not try to protect her younger self from her own withering disapproval — nor are her observations suffused with self pity, like Elizabeth Wurtzel's in "Prozac Nation." She reveals both her successes and her foibles in a way that's genuinely gratifying to the reader.

Some of the more personal essays do irritate, though. It's astonishing that GQ would ever have paid for "American Shiksa," a boring and aggressively stupid essay about Daum's love of Jewish men, or that anyone would have any interest in "Carpet is Mungers," a very dull examination of carpet as a middle-class, suburban signifier.

The standout essay is the last, "Variations on Grief," which is an honest portrait of the death of one of the author's friends. It's painful in its forthright manner, its refusal to become a flattering obituary. "My Misspent Youth" may well be worth reading for this essay alone, or for its take on life as a big city writer-type. Then again, the fact that Daum has chucked it all for life in Lincoln, Neb., which is apparent from the jacket bio, accomplishes the same objective, and takes much less time.

— Rumaan Alam (rumaanalam@hotmail.com)