The Quality of Life Report Read online

  Praise for Meghan Daum’s The Quality of Life Report

  “There are layers of social commentary here that take a page straight from the Tom Wolfe playbook. . . . Social satire in these oversensitive times is the devil to pull off. Poking fun at anyone other than the rich and ridiculous may work for stand-up comedians but is tricky for the novelist. Daum manages the near impossible: to make fun of people without judging them.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “If The Quality of Life Report, a comic, caustic first novel by essayist and National Public Radio regular Meghan Daum, were any less honest, her story could have ended on page fifteen. But Daum’s bittersweet deconstruction of Lucinda’s illusions reads like The Bridges of Madison County etched in acid.”

  —Time

  “In this winning debut novel . . . Daum manages to present, then explode, a motley crew of American stereotypes. . . . No one escapes Daum’s wit or criticism; ultimately, each earns her respect. . . . If the premise sounds a bit stale—big city girl searches for happiness, love and better life in small town—The Quality of Life Report is anything but. Daum’s humor and humanity have seen to that.”

  —The Nation

  “Daum’s sharp eye for the cultural quirk makes for a compulsive read.”

  —Time Out New York

  “In bringing off this credible story in a novel that also features high humor, Daum displays a talent as true as it is new.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “Meghan Daum has written a stunner of a book—outrageously perceptive, unexpectedly poignant, and most of all incalculably funny. I found myself chortling aloud in my bed as I read it, amazed at its take-no-prisoners attitude to all that passes for a hip inhabitation of the world. The Quality of Life Report is every thing that touted novels by young urban women are supposed to be but generally are not: original, wise beyond its years, and absolutely true to itself. Daum’s is a glistening talent, one that leaves most of her contemporaries—male and female—in the dust. What can I say? Here’s a novel for the ages.”

  —Daphne Merkin

  “It’s an absorbing read, a literary page turner brimming with witty dialogue and compelling narrative turns.”

  —The Hartford Courant

  “Daum’s essay collection My Misspent Youth established her as a thoughtful and terrifically gifted writer, and her first novel lives up to that promise. . . . Daum raises big questions in her bracing, funny novel. At once hilarious and wistful, it’s such a plea sure to read that after you turn the last page, you want to start over from the beginning and read it again.”

  —Booklist

  “I cared deeply about Lucinda Trout, Meghan Daum’s winning, hilarious, Chardonnay-seeking narrator. Lucinda and Ms. Daum herself share a flair for chic satire, plain truth, and, most impressively, a rare, wise forgiveness.”

  —David Schickler, author of Kissing in Manhattan

  “Though the love story occupies center stage, this is not mere chick lit, and men will enjoy it, too. It is a confident first novel, full of wit and deft social criticism, often very funny and frequently wise. Daum is a rising star.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “With a keen eye and trenchant wit, Meghan Daum skewers the obsessive narcissism and sense of entitlement that passes for real values in our media-driven culture. Always funny, often painfully so, The Quality of Life Report is more than simply satirical. It is an intelligent and heartfelt tale of a young woman, making radical choices and waking up to her life.”

  —Ruth Ozeki, author of My Year of Meats and All Over Creation

  “An often brilliant comedy of overturned expectations.”

  —BookPage

  “A wry and witty novel.”

  —Omaha World-Herald

  “As hilarious as this novel is, its core is hard-won wisdom. Writing that appears this effortless can only be accomplished by the rigor and magic of a truly gifted novelist.”

  —Melissa Bank, author of The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing

  MEGHAN DAUM

  Foreword by CURTIS SITTENFELD

  Quality Report of The Life

  A Novel

  University of Texas Press

  AUSTIN

  Copyright © 2003, 2017 by Meghan Daum

  Foreword copyright © 2017 by Curtis Sittenfeld

  All rights reserved

  Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to:

  Permissions

  University of Texas Press

  P.O. Box 7819

  Austin, TX 78713 -7819

  http://utpress.utexas.edu/index.php/rp-form

  Publisher’s Note

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is purely coincidental.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Daum, Meghan, 1970– author. | Sittenfeld, Curtis, writer of supplementary textual content.

  Title: The quality of life report : a novel / Meghan Daum; foreword by Curtis Sittenfeld.

  Description: Austin : University of Texas Press, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016045443| ISBN 978-1-4773-1300-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 978-1-4773-1315-2 (library e-book) | ISBN 978-1-4773-1316-9 (nonlibrary e-book)

  Subjects: LCSH: Middle West—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3604.A93 Q25 2017 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016045443

  doi:10.7560/313008

  Contents

  Foreword

  Open Arms, Open Minds

  Alternative Lifestyle Alert

  A Serious, More Humanitarian Direction

  The Lay of the Land

  A Sociocultural Analysis of the Margin of Error

  Rode Hard and Put Away Wet

  How to Throw a Barn Dance for Under $300

  The Hidden Benefits of Tanning

  Today’s Word Is Glamoricious

  The Guy in the Clouds

  Embrace, Empathize, Empower

  The Margin Widens

  One Year Later

  Acknowledgments

  An Interview with Meghan Daum

  A Note on the Author

  Foreword

  CURTIS SITTENFELD

  I first read The Quality of Life Report in August 2003, four months after its publication, and even then I remember thinking, What took me so long? Why did no one pull me aside and tell me just how much I’d love this novel? Specifically, why had my two close friends who’d already read it not conveyed a greater urgency? Because honestly, I felt as if Meghan Daum had written the book just for me. Of course, the mark of a truly special novel, and I believe The Quality of Life Report qualifies, is that many, many readers feel as if it was written just for them.

  The funny thing is that a summary of The Quality of Life Report doesn’t make it sound irresistible, or at least not like my version of irresistible: urbane Lucinda Trout, who is in her early thirties and works in the media, moves from New York to the fictitious midwestern town of Prairie City, where she finds (not necessarily in this order) love, cheaper housing prices, and wholesome locals. The tone is at times biting, even satirical. In some ways, Lucinda’s views of herself and of life turn out to be right and in some ways they turn out to be wrong.

  As it happens, I myself am a midwesterner who was born in Ohio and currently lives in Missouri after stretches spent on both coasts; I’m also familiar with the print version of the New York media world, having freelanced for twenty years for various publications. I offer these biograp
hical details to illustrate the ways in which the premise of The Quality of Life Report might actually be offputting to me—might seem tiresome or condescending or hit too close to home.

  And in lesser hands, any number of things could have gone wrong. But Meghan Daum is incapable of tiresome writing. Whether it’s her essays, newspaper columns, or fiction, she is always smart, always observant, always willing to push past clichés and truisms and engage deeply with the quirks and hypocrisies and charms of human behavior. She is brutally, wonderfully honest. And she is often extremely funny.

  Thus, the execution of The Quality of Life Report is marvelous: every page, every paragraph, is insightful and witty, penetratingly intelligent, granularly textured. Daum’s take on the Midwest is so nuanced that even though it’s far from uncritical, it’s still a kind of love letter, as such close observation always is. Her characters are like real people, and she treats them with the exasperation and compassion that real people warrant.

  I clearly recall when I discovered Daum’s work: it was 1997, I’d recently graduated from college, I was interning at a newspaper in Charlotte, North Carolina, and I was rapt while reading an essay she’d written for The New Yorker about the quasi-romantic emails she’d exchanged with a man online and the letdown of meeting him in real life. In fact, I admired that essay so much that—true story—I wrote her a fan letter I never sent. I also remember when I first read The Quality of Life Report: I was in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where I’d driven with my younger sister just prior to her starting a new job. I sat on my sister’s roommate’s living room couch, inhaling the book, amazed and delighted by it. Since 1997, Daum has been a writer I want to read regardless of topic.

  In the years since my own first novel was published, in 2005, I’ve been asked often for book recommendations, and sometimes these recommendations run as lists on radio programs or in magazines. More than once, I’ve thought to myself, Have I exceeded the number of times I can legally recommend The Quality of Life Report? I hope not because I want to declare once more how terrific I think it is. I’m thrilled that it’s being reissued, and I hope that it, and Daum, will find many new and enthusiastic readers.

  Open Arms, Open Minds

  For the sake of those involved, I will say only this: my moral, ethical, and, if not spiritual, let’s say existential coming-of-age took place in a more or less rectangular-shaped state in the Midwest—closer to the West Coast than the east by maybe one hundred miles, closer to Canada than Mexico by maybe three hundred—in a town populated by approximately ninety thousand government employees, farmers, academics, insurance salesmen, assembly-line workers, antique dealers, real estate agents, rape crisis counselors, certified massage therapists, girls volleyball coaches, and a whole lot of other people who, as they would tell it, just wanted to live in a peaceful place where movies cost six dollars and the children’s zoo was free, and where library fines, even if you kept the book for a year, even if you dropped the book in the bathtub and returned it looking like it had been rescued by search divers, were rarely known to exceed five dollars. The state, dogged neither by oppressive Pentecostal leanings nor a preponderance of Teva-shod rafting guide types, was neither in the Bible Belt nor the Rocky Mountains. It had few lakes, only a handful of rivers, and none of the kind of topography that might attract Japanese tourists or inspire bumper stickers of the THIS CAR CLIMBED . . . variety.

  There was very little to climb on this terrain. It was flat and treeless and cliffless. Even so, Prairie City had made the most of itself. It housed a state college, a public television station, and an independent movie theater that had screened The Last Temptation of Christ when the commercial cinemas had dropped the film because of picketers, most of whom were a small but vocal group of Seventh-day Adventists and a few of whom were Lutherans looking for a diversion. Generally speaking, though, all points of view were welcome. For years, Prairie City’s welcome sign had read A GREAT PLACE TO LIVE until, under an initiative to promote diversity, the city council voted to change the motto to OPEN ARMS, OPEN MINDS. It was a fitting kickoff to the other placards in town. For every billboard reminding passing drivers that DURING AN ABORTION, SOMETHING DIES INSIDE there was another encouraging HIV testing, pet spay and neutering, or two-dollar mai tais at the Thirteenth Street TGI Friday’s, which, though not all citizens realized it, was a major hangout for the community’s sizable gay and lesbian population. For seven years running, the town had ranked in the top twenty in U.S. News & World Report’s Most Livable Cities. In addition to its low rate of violent crime, good public school system, and four meticulously maintained municipal pools, Prairie City had the good fortune to have been hit by only six tornadoes during the entire period of the Clinton administration, just three of which killed anybody, all in trailer parks.

  In Prairie City, trailer parks rubbed right up against elementary schools, public playgrounds, and houses of worship. Train tracks crisscrossed the city like lattice work, leaving little room for right sides or wrong sides. At Effie’s Tavern on Highway 36, assembly-line workers from the Firestone tire plant gathered after their shifts and downed Leinenkugels alongside insurance agents in short-sleeved dress shirts and choir directors in Birkenstocks and attorneys and social service case workers and even local politicians, most of whom got off work at 3:30 on Friday afternoons and began drinking around 3:54. Prairie City was a good-hearted place, not so much in the sense that moral aberrations never occurred but more in that when something did go wrong—a paleontology professor got caught downloading child pornography from the Web, an elected official was discovered freebasing coke in the public restroom behind the band shell—community head shaking took the form of bemusement rather than scorn. Everyone understood that everyone screwed up once in a while. What mattered was that you showed some class about it. What mattered was that you still helped your neighbor build his back deck. You still sat on the symphony board or at least volunteered to pick trash off the median of Highway 36 once a year. You accepted both your co-worker’s gender reassignment surgery and the possibility that, during any given summer, golf-ball–sized hail could give your dog a concussion.

  The concept of acceptance was vital to Prairie City. It stemmed from the legacy of its first residents, most of whom, in the mid-1800s, were bound for the West Coast on the Oregon Trail. Since Prairie City marked a point where the trail often became impassable in winter, the pioneers used it as a stopover until spring. Except that many never left. As legend has it, Prairie City was imbued with a mysterious force that kept its supposedly temporary residents from resuming their journeys. Of those who did leave, countless numbers found themselves coming back after just a few years on the coast. It was hard for them to explain what had brought them. The tug of that land was as strong and invisible as gravity. The wind, though it shrieked in every season, soon lulled even the most restless souls into contentment. The people stopped thinking about gold and started building schoolhouses. They had more children. They joined sewing circles. They told themselves so many times that they were going to leave that, as generations died and were born, the Plan to Leave became as much a part of community life as agriculture itself. It was all a matter of holding off until the right time, of getting through the winter and then the summer and then winter again. Long before Effie’s Tavern ever served its first draft, the citizens of Prairie City had perfected the art of waiting things out.

  OF COURSE, I didn’t know much about waiting things out before I came to Prairie City. I knew next to nothing about anything, unless you count a deeply ingrained knowledge of the latest sociocultural great truths about the twenty- and thirtysomethings of America, which I discussed with my friends over drinks on at least a twice-weekly basis. Some examples of our areas of inquiry:

  A) No one wears gold anymore. It just went away. Remember how in the 1980s everyone wore gold? Like a gold tennis bracelet? Now it’s silver. Nothing but silver. Wedding bands are platinum or white gold. When is the last time you saw a gold wedding band? Seriously? B
ut you’re not, like, friends with that person?

  B) More and more women are feeling pressure to not get married until they’re at least twenty-eight. But at the same time there’s pressure to marry before you’re thirty-four. That leaves a very small window. Six years to find a husband. Consider the latest census data that there are seven hundred thousand more single women than single men in New York (not even counting gay people, of which there are more men than lesbians). Ergo, limited window of opportunity plus disproportionate gender ratio equals . . . imminent spinsterhood for thousands of women. What to call this? The New Spinster? The Spinsterization of America?

  C) Yogurt. What happened? It just went away.

  D) Is thirty-seven the new twenty-six?

  E) Lucinda’s apartment lease. Loss of. What is she going to do?

  Lucinda was me. Is me. Except the Lucinda who lost her apartment lease on Broadway and Ninety-fourth Street in Manhattan was a person of such a long time ago that I have difficulty even associating that face—pale, unlined, dabbed with Chanel makeup that I never knew how to apply right—with the one who now tells this story. Like so many people in Prairie City, my face has been subjected to a kind of wind that blows in so hard from the north that you find yourself reaching for a tree in order to stay on the ground, only to realize there are no trees, just an ocean of grass. This is the kind of place that makes you wonder if wind can render gravity irrelevant, if weather itself can make you crazy. You lie in bed and wonder if the Apocalypse has come or if it’s just another night in June. The early settlers had a name for this; they called it prairie madness. Pioneers who had migrated from the east literally went insane from the shrieking wind. It seemed to affect the women disproportionately, maybe because the men were insane to begin with. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  When I was twenty-nine and a regular participant in conversations (if we were going to hand in the receipts to our office accounting departments we called them “brainstorming sessions”) about What’s Happening in America Today, I was an associate producer at a local television magazine show called New York Up Early. Despite not being on a major network, it had two million viewers in the metropolitan area. Hosted by Bonnie Crawley and Samantha Frank, a pair of thirtyish women positioned to “complement” each other (one was perky, the other, who wore nerd-chic glasses, quirky), the program dealt with a variety of New York issues: mob-related crime, the Bryant Park fashion shows, the rooftop gardens of rich people. I was the Lifestyle correspondent, a position I’d achieved after five years of fetching espressos and making restaurant reservations for Up Early’s bipolar, metabolically freakish senior producer, Faye Figaro (at five foot eleven, she weighed 119; she also threw staplers at people). Though my annual salary had been raised to a mere $31,900 (this made tolerable only by my rent-stabilized one-windowed cell on West Ninety-fourth Street), I enjoyed the privileges of a minor celebrity in that I appeared on camera and interviewed people about What New Yorkers Are Thinking About Today, which, in most cases, was what Faye, Bonnie, Samantha, I and the rest of the staff (all female except one gay guy) were thinking about.