Genre: Nonfiction, Memoir
Published:January 22, 2019
Pages: 288
🍊🍊/5
My Review:
To begin, I applaud the author and her incredible determination and perseverance in supporting her young daughter by doing menial and demeaning cleaning jobs.
However I was disappointed in this memoir. The chapters felt repetitive and non emotional as she recounts the details about each house she worked at. She talks about the owners of each house as she cleans their most personal spaces. She’s exhausted and treated very poorly by store clerks. She spends hours and days wading through the governmental red tape and has to constantly prove her income, however small it is. She has no extra money for anything. And her daughter has health issues from black mold where they’re living.
There is definitely a stigma on people who use food stamps and utilize section 8 housing. She touches on the subject here…
“It seemed like no matter how much I tried to prove otherwise, “poor” was always associated with dirty. How was I supposed to present myself to landlords as a responsible tenant when I was faced with a wall of stigmas stacked so high?”
It was a heartbreaking story but I didn’t feel there was any big insight or message. The author was candid and straightforward about the hardships she endured and it’s important to shed light on the subject. She is still very young so I wonder where she’ll be in ten or twenty years? How will this experience inform her future choices? How will she look back on this time in her life?
About the Author:
Stephanie Land is the author of MAID: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, New York Review of Books, Washington Post, Guardian; Vox, Salon, and many other outlets. She focuses on social and economic justice as a writing fellow through both Community Change and the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. She lives in Missoula, Montana. Follow on Instagram and Twitter @stepville or visit her website at stepville.com.
QOTD: What’s the hardest, worst job you’ve had?
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The OC Book Girl 
Yours is the first review of this I’ve read after hearing a lot of buzz about this book recently. Sounds a little disappointing, I’m not sure if this one will be for me. Great to read your thoughts on it!
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Eeek thanks! 🙈
It’s really hard to post reviews for so-so books (especially hyped ones), but I’m trying to keep it real. I’ll be curious to read other reviews…
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I know what you mean. But you have to be honest! And so-so reviews are really helpful, I wasn’t sure about reading this one (just because I’ve read a lot in this “Nickel and Dimed”-type genre already) but I can tell from your summary that it’s not really what I want to read, so thanks for that! Will be interesting to hear what others take from it.
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Thank you for the helpful feedback!
I don’t know that term “Nickel and Dimed” I’ll have to look it up. 🤔
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It was a pretty popular book that came out awhile ago, where the journalist author worked a series of low-wage jobs, like as a maid, at Walmart, etc., to see what the conditions were like and if you could actually survive on the money. It was interesting, if not exactly surprising!
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Okay I get it! I read the synopsis and you’re right – they are similar…
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