Daum - Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House

Honest and endearing richly drawn. Daum captures the now-gone moment when real estate became a national obsession, chronicling the shared madness of those who could only take breaks from watching HGTV to discuss closing costs. As she moves from coast to coast and in between, Daum is consistently relatable.

Los Angeles Times Book Review

Daum has a rare gift in her ability to keep readers laughing through her own tears. Her spirit is generous, her writing is buoyant, and her heart is open to all the ways in which a house holds the key to happiness. Perfection has nothing to do with it.

The New York Times Book Review

Suffused with humor and desire. Alternately whimsical, philosophical and psychologically probing. [An] enchanting, compelling memoir on the impossibility of resisting an irresistible object of desire.

The Miami Herald

Daum tackles real estateor, more pointedly, the fixation, anxiety and magical thinking that often accompany itwith wit and a gift for self-parody. Her prose has smarts, style and personality, but never turns pretentious. Its a pleasure to read this author as she revisits comic misadventures and wrangles with a hot-button topic.

Time Out New York

Vividly described. Daum exposes the modern real-estate-mad female underground, where open houses (visited in rabid two-women teams) are a seasonal blood sport, Zillow is a verb, and where remodeling a collapsing farmhouse into a writers retreat could instantly, we imagine, transform us into the George Plimpton of the prairie.

The Atlantic Monthly

Entertaining. Like a romantic comedy in which Daum always seems to rent Mr. Wrong. Dont be surprised if you race through Life Would Be Perfect in a single night.

Richmond Times-Dispatch

Daum is the essential Generation X-er. She radiates the eternal youthfulness and the fear of commitment that define her cohort. Life Would Be Perfect is the memoir of how the wandering Ms. Daum finally put down some roots. A great book.

The Philadelphia Inquirer

Timely. Daum [is] a fine writercandid, reflective, stylish, fun and a bit prickly. Throughout the book, she offers an unflinching portrayal of her anxieties and her aspirations. When she finally realizes that a house is not what will make her whole, you cant help but breathe a sigh of relief.

Associated Press

In this funny, horrifying (she came this close to buying a place near a roaring interstate because she was smitten with a landing) achingly honest memoir, Daum explores the way we wrap our identities in our surroundings, at one point wondering, Did the house look sexy on me? Home truths, indeed.

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Meghan Daum is the author of the essay collection My Misspent Youth and the novel The Quality of Life Report, a New York Times Notable Book. Her column on political, cultural, and social affairs appears weekly in the Los Angeles Times and is distributed nationally through the McClatchy news service. She has contributed to public radios Morning Edition, Marketplace, and This American Life, and has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, Harpers Magazine, GQ, Vogue, Harpers Bazaar, and The New York Times Book Review. She lives in Los Angeles.

www.meghandaum.com

ALSO BY MEGHAN DAUM

The Quality of Life Report

My Misspent Youth

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, JUNE 2011

Copyright 2010 by Meghan Daum

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2010.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Out of concern for the privacy of individuals depicted here, the author has changed the names of certain individuals, as well as some of the addresses and certain identifying details about individuals and houses, such as exact home prices.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Daum, Meghan.
Life would be perfect if I lived in that house / Meghan Daum.1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Daum, Meghan, 1970Homes and haunts. 2. Real estate businessHumor. I. Title.
PS3604.A93Z46 2010
814.6dc22
2009037002

eISBN: 978-0-307-59360-3

www.vintagebooks.com

Cover design: Keenan

v3.1

For my mother

Y esterday, a piece of my house came off in my hands. I dont mean that metaphorically. I banged the garbage can against an outside wall, and a piece of stucco about the size of a sheet of paper came ever so slightly loose. When I touched it, it fell gently into my palm. It was as if the house were giving me a lock of its hair, or perhaps coughing up phlegm. I was concerned, but it also happened that I was really busy that day. I just couldnt get into it with the stucco, not right then anyway. Also, I was coming up on my five-year anniversary of owning the house, and if theres anything Ive learned in five years, its this: if a piece of your house falls off and you dont know what to do with it, throwing it in the trash and forgetting about it is a perfectly viable option. And it so happened that the trash can was right there. Once upon a time I would have made a beeline to the yellow pages to look up stucco replacement, but Ive come a long way since then.

So has the house. I bought it in 2004, and as I write this, its supposedly worth $100,000 less than what I paid for it. By the time you read this, it will probably be worth even less than that. I try not to care because if I cared too much, or even thought about it too much, Id go insane. Ive spent enough time here being insane, believe me. I was insane when I bought the place, and I went even more insane afterward. Then again, the whole world was high a few years ago. 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. For my part, its tempting to say I succumbed to peer pressure, but it was really much more complicated than that. There is no object of desire quite like a house. Few things in this world are capable of eliciting such urgent, even painful, yearning. Few sentiments are at once as honest and as absurd as the one that moves us to declare: Life would be perfect if I lived in that house.

Im writing this book in homage to that sentiment, which is to say Im telling the story of a very imperfect life lived among very imperfect houses.

A large part of that story, of course, involves the house that is now falling apart in my hands, the gist of which is basically this: In 2004, I was among the nearly six million Americans who purchased real estate. Like roughly a quarter of them, I was a single woman (single men dont buy houses nearly as often), and I was making the leap for the first time. Again, this was a time when the real estate market had reached a frenzy that surpassed even the tech boom of the mid-1990s. It was scarcely possible back then to attend a party or even get your teeth cleaned without falling into a conversation about real estate: its significance, its desirability, its increasing aura of unattainability. My dental hygienist, for example, had robust opinions about reverse mortgages.