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

“Quickened pulse, night sweats, insomnia . . . all the depredations of a love affair gone wrong. Anyone over the age of 30 who lived, worked or breathed in any proximity to the real estate market in the last decade will immediately recognize the signs of house lust. But I spent years as the editor of House & Garden, and I don’t think I ever encountered a case like Meghan Daum’s. . . . Life Would Be Perfect if I Lived in That House adroitly manages to be funny, charming and shocking in its brutal frankness about an obsession that threatens to upend sanity and bank accounts. Luckily, as was not the case for so many caught in the national grip of cheap mortgages, Daum’s is the story of a love too big to fail. . . . She is smart about what makes a house beautiful in the eye of the beholder. . . . There’s a mania about moving that cleverly masks a dread even more profound than that of not being human, and that is the dread of not being married. . . . Daum promises she doesn’t intend to write a book with the happily-ever-after banality that’s beginning to get on my nerves. Is it becoming a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman in possession of a good house must be in search of a husband? It speaks volumes in Daum’s favor, then, that when she does fall in love, this reader took as much pleasure in it as I hope she will someday, when she isn’t preoccupied with the important things like bursting closets, crammed bookshelves, and the detritus of combining two households, two lives. Daum has a rare gift in her ability to keep readers laughing through her own tears. Among the many wonderful things about houses is that they are such handy metaphors for so many things: love or loss, renewal or collapse. . . . Daum revels in all of it. There are times you want to sob with her, as she bloodies her knuckles and throws out her back, wrenching her reluctant house closer to its best possible self. Daum’s journey from the buying of a house to the making of a home is arduous. There are times when it all gets so scary you hold your breath before crossing the threshold with her. But 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.”
—Dominique Browning, The New York Times Book Review

“A delightful dissection of the real estate obsession that’s a hallmark of our age, recession or no.”
—Sara Nelson, O Magazine 

“For all the talk of tranches and credit-default swaps, the recent financial meltdown began with something far more primal: house lust and its accompanying dreams and delusions. . . . The fantasy of a life transformed is what makes the ads and features in interior magazines so enticing—no fashion or celebrity magazine glamorizes its subjects as thoroughly as Architectural Digest or Elle Decor—and what gives HGTV’s low-budget shows their addictive appeal. The longing for the perfect life in the perfect environment can make real-estate listings and ‘For Sale’ signs as evocative as novels. . . . A stock-market bubble may create financial hardship, but a housing bust breaks hearts. Although Daum did buy a house in 2004 and watched its value rise and then fall, her self-deprecatingly funny memoir isn’t a tale of real-estate speculation. Rather she uses her lifelong obsession with finding the ideal living space to probe domestic desire, a deeper restlessness than the search for quick profits. . . . Like a traditional comedy, Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House ends with a wedding and the promise of settled adulthood. Except that Ms. Daum and her husband barely fit into the tiny rundown place she eventually purchased . . . She hopes to move to some place bigger, some place truly their own. What else should we expect from a child enraptured by Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House stories, where every book starts or ends with a move? Moving is the American way. If your American dream involves a house, it’s probably not the one you’re living in right now.”
—Virginia Postrel, The Wall Street Journal

“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, [and her] metaphor of romance makes perfect sense in the context of real estate. . . . Her descriptions of [Los Angeles] neighborhoods are meticulous enough to play Name That Intersection. . . . 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. 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 . . . ”
—Chris Daley, Los Angeles Times Book Review 
 
“Suffused with humor and desire . . . Offbeat yet utterly compelling . . . Life Would be Perfect If I Lived in That House is Daum’s meditation—alternately whimsical, philosophical and psychologically probing—on her unquenchable lust for the ideal home. . . . Daum’s hilarious co-star is her mother, who could never resist an open house. Daum attributes her compulsions and her strong identification with where she lives to her mother’s attempts to ‘cope with identity confusion that plagued our immediate family like a skin rash.’ . . . Like her mother, who found a means of expressing her thwarted ambition through decor, the peripatetic Daum finds her own perfect means of expression: this enchanting, compelling memoir on the impossibility of resisting an irresistible object of desire.”
—Susan Miron, The Miami Herald

“Daum recalls a life of relocation, falling for and then abandoning residences like a string of disappointing lovers. . . . As this charming book proves, settling down is never as much fun as the chase—especially when your rickety home’s value starts to plummet. Throughout, Daum tackles real estate—or, more pointedly, the fixation, anxiety and magical thinking that often accompany it—with wit and a gift for self-parody. Her analysis of her parents’ New Jersey home has the interpretive flair of Joan Didion. Her prose has smarts, style and personality, but never turns pretentious . . . It’s a pleasure to read this author as she revisits comic misadventures and wrangles with a hot-button topic.”
—Michael Miller, Time Out New York

“What’s more fun than falling madly in love with a piece of real estate? Nowhere is this more vividly described than in Meghan Daum’s wry new memoir, Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House, a (nearly) man-free romance that could easily spark a new genre: My House, My Self. Here 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 writer’s retreat could instantly, we imagine, transform us into the George Plimpton of the prairie . . . ”
—Sandra Tsing Loh, The Atlantic Monthly

“Daum has been making me laugh for nearly 20 years. . . . She’s got the wit of Molly Ivins and the brains of Mary McCarthy, but unlike these icons, she can’t be pinned down to any region, religion, or political affiliation. Instead, Daum is the essential Generation X-er. Although pushing 40, Daum radiates the eternal youthfulness and the fear of commitment that define her cohort. She spent the first three decades of her life terrified of being tied down—to a job, a lover, or a place. However, committing oneself is the mark of a grown-up, and Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House is the memoir of how the wandering Ms. Daum finally put down some roots. It’s also the story of America’s obsession with real estate and the colossal illogic on the part of bankers and buyers that precipitated the housing-market crash of the new millennium. . . . A great book.”
—Susan Balée, The Philadelphia Inquirer 
 
“Delightful and vivid . . . Cleverly framing her real-estate frenzy alongside the nation’s, Daum takes you on in her quest for a home—and a more profound sense of self. Her journey is nuanced and smart.”
—Jessica Grose, DoubleX.com

“Funny, thoughtful, acutely self-aware [and] self-deprecating . . . In 2004, before the U.S. real estate market turned Chernobyl, Meghan Daum bought her first house. The property cost more than she had budgeted, came with an uninsurable garage reminiscent of the ruins of Pompeii, and had an electrical system visitors could smell. . . . The then-single woman describes the loss of her real estate virginity at age 34: ‘Like a girl who cares more about being married than who she’s married to, I swallowed my pride and signed the first set of papers.’ The analogy is perfect. Daum’s consummation with [her] mortgage is as avidly anticipated as a Jane Austen wedding. Indeed, if the novelist was writing today, her heroines would be like Daum: independent women who dream of property, not matrimony; who troll Craigslist for hot real estate prospects, not men; and who think in terms of square footage, not karat size. . . . This real-estate-cum-addiction memoir is laced with clever aperçus. Daum’s insight into decor media [like HGTV], for one, is bang-on . . . And her r...

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 radio's Morning Edition, Marketplace, and This American Life, and has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, GQ, Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, and The New York Times Book Review. She lives in Los Angeles.

www.meghandaum.com