When the Los Angeles Times named Daum as one of its newest Op-Ed contributors recently, I doubt I was the only one to raise an eyebrow wondering what on earth the paper was thinking. Didn’t she live in, like, Nebraska? (not that it stopped the LAT from letting Michael Kinsley run the whole enterprise from Seattle, but there you go.) The NYO’s Sheelah Kohlatkar wondered the same thing, and decided to track Daum down, where she’s been living in LA for two years already.
So what happened?
“A lot of what happened in Nebraska was that my whole career started to be about having moved to Nebraska,” Ms. Daum said. “And after a while, I started to feel like I’d said everything I had to say about it.”
Moreover, if the simple life cost less money, it also paid less. Ms. Daum took other jobs to make ends meet—including marketing work for a social-service agency—but, she said, “I just wasn’t making any money. I think I made $12,000 one year.”
So: Goodbye, cornfields—hello, freeways! In 2003, Ms. Daum slid the rest of the way across the continent. There, she wrote the screenplay of the novel that she’d moved to Lincoln to write.
Unsuccessful in two bids to buy Nebraska farms, Ms. Daum is now a homeowner in Echo Park. The Quality of Life Report script has been optioned twice, according to Ms. Daum, and is currently under option to Nicole Kidman, for Ms. Kidman to produce.
As for whether she’d move back to NYC, well…
“Obviously, I would love to be in a position to have my house here and have a farm in Nebraska and have an apartment in New York, and maybe someday that’ll happen,” said Ms. Daum. “I miss my friends in New York a lot but I also see them plenty and go back plenty. I don’t think my dog would want to move back to New York. I think Joan Didion’s line, that it’s a place for the very rich and the very young, still holds up, and I’m not young any more and I’m not rich.”
And at least based on that photo, the Hollywood effect is in full force, or maybe I’m the only one detecting a distinct Reese Witherspoon resemblance. Damn, that Marion Ettlinger, she really works some wonders!
