The Catastrophe Hour
Winner of the Inaugural Airmail Tom Wolfe Prize for Reportage 2025
One of the seminal voices of Generation X, award-winning essayist and much-loved podcaster Daum delivers a brilliant collection of thrilling essays that touch on aging, divorce, dating, real estate, death and money.
For the last five or six years, on many afternoons around 4 or 5 p.m., I’ve been overcome with the sensation that my life is effectively over. This is not a sensation of the world ending; it’s a distinct feeling of being at the end of my days. My time, while technically not “up,” is disappearing in the rearview mirror. The fact that this feeling of ambient doom tends to coincide with the blue-tinged, pre-gloaming light of the late afternoon lends to the whole thing a cosmic beauty, as devastating as it is awe-inspiring. As such, I’ve dubbed this the catastrophe hour.
In this rapturously reviewed collection Daum showcases her wit, intellect and uncanny ability to throw new light on even the most ubiquitous of subjects. Daum’s unflinching honesty and exacting observations secure her reputation as one of our most important and enduring essayists.
Reviews
“Reading The Catastrophe Hour, though, it’s impossible to avoid thoughts of Joan Didion … The life under scrutiny is her own, but Daum is always situating her private predicaments in proximity to the wider world and the Zeitgeist’s preoccupations: real estate, money, vanity, and all the ways that the personal is ever more ensnared in the technological.” — Thomas Beller, Air Mail
“Daum is the rare contemporary writer who simply tells the truth in the unvarnished manner that inevitably hits the hardest . . . one of our most important essaysists.”—Alex Perez, Washington Examiner
“For 30 years, Daum has been an incisive chronicler of her life and times. Now, in an age that feels like an unraveling, in this book she puts her finger on both her unique experience and our collective one… This book is a beautiful object, and so packable it can fit in a purse. What a delight it would be this summer to pull it out and engage in that now-radical act of reading a book in public. ” —Emily Yoffe, The Free Press
“Essayist, novelist, and memoirist Daum, host of the Unspeakable podcast, gathers 14 acerbic, intimate essays written between 2016 and 2024 on a variety of themes, including marriage and divorce, childlessness and motherhood, friendship and music…..Sharp, deft commentary.” —Kirkus Reviews
“In these forthright pieces, Daum meditates on the vagaries of midlife.” —Publishers Weekly