Do you routinely scour the real estate section of your local newspaper cover to cover? Secretly subscribe to multiple online home listing services? Obsess over open homes on Sunday afternoons? Stash piles of glossy real estate fliers in the glove compartment or under the front seat of your car? Well, here's the perfect read for you:
Los Angeles Times columnist Meghan Daum's funny, revealing and illuminating "Life Would be Perfect If I Lived in That House" - published by Knopf and available in hardback for all manner of fantasy-home-seekers anonymous types, puts the American dream into perspective.
"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," writes Daum in the telling of her self-described, impassioned pursuit of the ultimate in "domestic integrity" - an ideal match of place to the person we all think we should be.
Haven't you flicked through your favorite home and garden or chic, urban interior design magazine in the dentists' waiting room and had an 'aha' moment when the kitchen of your wildest domestic-themed dreams appears at the random turn of a page? Ripped it out, even? I know I have.
Raised on "Little House on the Prairie", sidetracked by an early infatuation with peeling, pre-war Manhattan apartments, seduced by screen doors and porches and Nebraskan farms and brought back to reality by affordability options in Silver Lake, Southern Cal, Daum's insightful and amusing probing into her obsessions on the primal, domestic front mirror those of several generations of Americans (and I dare say, our counterparts elsewhere in the world), who share her: "perpetual curiosity" towards the potential for happiness at the final destination of the mover's truck.
yes, property and a pool
Posted by: genevieve foster | Saturday, May 08, 2026 at 09:21 AM