Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive
by Stephanie Land
Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Jan 2019
288 pages
Genre: Biography/Memoir
Publication Information
Evicted meets Nickel and Dimed in Stephanie Land's memoir about working as a maid, a beautiful and gritty exploration of poverty in America. Includes a foreword by Barbara Ehrenreich.
"My daughter learned to walk in a homeless shelter."
While the gap between upper middle-class Americans and the working poor widens, grueling low-wage domestic and service work - primarily done by women - fuels the economic success of the wealthy. Stephanie Land worked for years as a maid, pulling long hours while struggling as a single mom to keep a roof over her daughter's head. In Maid, she reveals the dark truth of what it takes to survive and thrive in today's inequitable society.
While she worked hard to scratch her way out of poverty as a single parent, scrubbing the toilets of the wealthy, navigating domestic labor jobs, higher education, assisted housing, and a tangled web of government assistance, Stephanie wrote. She wrote the true stories that weren't being told. The stories of overworked and underpaid Americans.
Written in honest, heart-rending prose and with great insight, Maid explores the underbelly of upper-middle class America and the reality of what it's like to be in service to them. "I'd become a nameless ghost," Stephanie writes. With this book, she gives voice to the "servant" worker, those who fight daily to scramble and scrape by for their own lives and the lives of their children.
"Starred Review. Heartfelt and powerful...Land's love for her daughter ("We were each other's moon and sun") shines brightly through the pages of this beautiful, uplifting story of resilience and survival." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. An important memoir that should be required reading for anyone who has never struggled with poverty." - Kirkus
"Land has perhaps succeeded in having her story told by virtue of her eventual triumph in escaping the grind of poverty. Her journey offers an illuminating read that should inspire outrage, hope, and change." - Library Journal
"Land's prose is vivid and engaging... [A] tightly-focused, well-written memoir... an incredibly worthwhile read." - Roxane Gay, New York Times bestselling author of Bad Feminist and Hunger: A Memoir
"In Maid, Stephanie Land, a gifted storyteller with an eye for details you'll never forget, exposes what it's like to exist in America as a single mother, working herself sick cleaning our dirty toilets, one missed paycheck away from destitution. It's a perspective we seldom see represented firsthand - and one we so desperately need right now. Timely, urgent, and unforgettable, this is memoir at its very best." - Susannah Cahalan, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness
"A sad and hopeful tale of being on the outside looking in, the author makes us wonder how'd we fare scrubbing and vacuuming away the detritus of an affluence that always seems beyond reach." - Steve Dublanica, New York Times bestselling author of Waiter Rant
"As a solo mom and former house cleaner, this brave book resonated with me on a very deep level...This memoir of resilience and love has never been more necessary." - Domenica Ruta, New York Times bestselling author of With or Without You
This information about Maid was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Journalist Stephanie Land's work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Vox, Salon, and many other outlets. She focuses on social and economic justice as a writing fellow through both the Center for Community Change and the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
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