Audio Essay: The End Of The Personal - Listen to an essay from The Catastrophe Hour

The Unspeakable Podcast

Meghan Daum

Society & Culture

4.8 • 784 Ratings

🗓️ 29 May 2025

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This week, I share an essay from The Catastrophe Hour. There’s no audiobook available (yet), so I offer this reading of the final essay in the collection, The End Of The Personal. It’s a meditation on first-person writing in a world that seems to have overdosed on oversharing.

The era of the personal is over. The writer sees this now. One day, she just gets it. Everything is personal so nothing is personal. The erosion has been a long time coming. First, the personal became political. Then it became porn. Now it has become dust.

The Catastrophe Hour book club begins on June 11 and runs every Wednesday from 3:00-4:00 p.m. ET for 14 consecutive weeks. We will read one essay each week, starting from the beginning of the book. Audio excerpts of each essay will be released every week as special podcast episodes. (They’ll be excerpts, so you’ll still want to get the book.)

To join the book club, become a paying subscriber to the Substack at the annual level. More info here.

HOUSEKEEPING

📺 Visit The Unspeakable on YouTube!

📖 Order my new book, The Catastrophe Hour: Selected Essays, on Amazon or directly from the publisher here.

📘 The Catastrophe Hour book club for yearly paying subscribers starts June 11 and will run for 14 consecutive Wednesdays 3-4pm ET. We will meet on Zoom. I’ll make a post about it very soon with more info.

📹 The Unspeakeasy Live livestream happens every Thursday at 3pm ET. Look for a notification on your Substack app when we’re live.

✈️ The Unspeakeasy’s 2025 retreat season is underway. It includes a just-announced COED retreat with more attendees and multiple speakers. October 11-12 in New York City. Programming and ticketing info here.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, it's Megan. This is a quick note to tell you about an exciting event that's coming up this
0:12.5	October in New York City. It's an unspeak easy retreat on steroids. It's not only co-ed,
0:18.8	since you guys have been asking for it, it is bigger than our usual
0:22.2	retreats with more participants and a lot of speakers. Those speakers include John McWhorter,
0:29.1	Peter Moskos, Mike Peska, Carol Hoeven, Lisa Selwyn-Davis, Alana Newhouse, Ben Appell,
0:36.6	Andrew Hartz, and a lot more. We are still adding speakers.
0:40.2	Oh, and me. I will be there. The way it's going to work is the speakers will do panels or be interviewed,
0:47.9	sometimes by me, sometimes by other people. And pretty quickly, those panels will open up to
0:53.2	include the attendees and it will turn into a
0:56.1	discussion, not just an audience Q&A, but a real conversation where you can interact with your
1:02.1	intellectual heroes. Like all unspeak easy retreats, it is totally off the record. No social media,
1:09.2	everything that happens, stays in the unspeak easy retreat,
1:13.0	beautiful space. It will be in a gorgeous space yet to be announced. This is happening October
1:18.5	11th and 12th from about 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day. Lunch is included. It's co-ed, and it will be
1:26.7	unlike anything you've ever experienced, and unlike
1:29.7	anything we've ever done at The Unspeak Easy. Spaces are limited, so go to theunspeak easy.com
1:36.0	slash retreats to find out how to sign up. Hope to see you there.
1:43.8	Welcome to the Unspeakable Podcast.
1:45.8	I'm your host, Megan Down.
1:47.5	This is a special edition of the podcast.
1:51.1	It is a solo episode.
1:52.9	It is audio only.
	...

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