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Maid LIB/e : Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive by Stephanie Land (2019, Compact Disc)

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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. 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.

About this product

Product Identifiers

PublisherHachette Book Group

ISBN-101549149555

ISBN-139781549149559

eBay Product ID (ePID)18038384077

Product Key Features

TopicSocial Classes & Economic Disparity, Personal Memoirs, Poverty & Homelessness, General, Women's Studies

Book TitleMaid Lib/E : Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive

Publication Year2019

LanguageEnglish

GenreSocial Science, Biography & Autobiography

AuthorStephanie Land

FormatCompact Disc

Additional Product Features

Intended AudienceTrade

ReviewsStephanie Land strips class divisions bare in her phenomenal memoir Maid , providing a profoundly important expose on the economy of being a single mother in America. This is the warrior cry from the tired, the poor, the huddled masses, reminding us to change our lives and remember how to see each other. Standing ovation. Not since Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed has the working woman's real life been so honestly illuminated., For readers who believe individuals living below the poverty line are lazy and/or intellectually challenged, this memoir is a stark, necessary corrective...Should be required reading for anyone who has never struggled with poverty., Land nails the sheer terror that comes with being poor, the exhausting vigilance of knowing that any misstep or twist of fate will push you deeper into the hole., Provides a trenchant reminder that something is amiss with the American Dream and gives voice to the millions of 'working poor' toiling in a country that needs them but doesn't want to see them., [A] vivid and visceral yet nearly unrelenting memoir... Her journey offers an illuminating read that should inspire outrage, hope, and change., It is with beautiful prose that Land chronicles her time working as a housekeeper to make ends meet...Captur[es] the experience of hardworking Americans who make little money and are often invisible to their employers., Land's love for her daughter shines brightly through the pages of this beautiful, uplifting story of resilience and survival., Land combines her raw, authentic voice and superb storytelling skills to create a firsthand account from the trenches., Maid is a testament to a young mother's survival skills - a constantly shifting balance of back-breaking labor, single-parenting responsibilities, complying with rules and regulations, college course-work, attitude adjustments and diplomacy on all fronts... The book is a gift of hope and joy for anyone lucky enough to see beyond blame., Takes readers inside the gritty, unglamorous life of the underpaid, overworked people who serve the upper-middle class for a living., As a solo mom and former house cleaner, this brave book resonated with me on a very deep level. We live in a world where the solo mother is an incomplete story: adrift in the world without a partner, without support, without a grounding, centering (male) force. But women have been doing this since the dawn of time, and Stephanie Land is one of millions of solo moms forced to get blood from stone. She is at once an old and new kind of American hero. This memoir of resilience and love has never been more necessary., For readers who believe individuals living below the poverty line are lazy and/or intellectually challenged, this memoir is a stark, necessary corrective.... [T]he narrative also offers a powerful argument for increasing government benefits for the working poor during an era when most benefits are being slashed.... An important memoir that should be required reading for anyone who has never struggled with poverty., "A single mother's personal, unflinching look at America's class divide, a description of the tightrope many families walk just to get by, and a reminder of the dignity of all work." -- President Barack Obama, "Obama's 2019 Summer Reading List", If this memoir doesn't shake you up and give you a stronger understanding of poverty in America, your heart must be made of coal. Stephanie Land, who spent years in poverty, clues you in to what it's really like to live in a shelter. It's hard to think that a white paper or TV documentary could say it as well as she does., Maid-part Educated , part Hillbilly Elegy -is an eye-opening portrait of how privilege and the female working class can commingle."-- Glamour, Maid delves into her time working for the upper middle class in the service industry, and in it, uncovers the true strength of the human spirit., [An] example of the determination and grace [is] ondisplay in her memoir, in which she renders vividly the back-breaking and oftensurreal work of deep-cleaning strangers' homes while navigating the bafflingbureaucracies of government assistance programs., Fascinating...Communicates clearly the challenges of a marginal existence as a single mother living in poverty as she sought to provide a stable and predictable home for her daughter in a situation that was anything but stable and predictable., Her book dares you to look down on her, and then shows you who you are when you do...Land's memoir offers no solutions to poverty. That is not its purpose. Instead, her purpose is to show how little many of us understand the working poor., For readers who believe individuals living below the poverty line are lazy and/or intellectually challenged, this memoir is a stark, necessary corrective., [A] heartfelt and powerful debut memoir.... Land's love for her daughter... shines brightly through the pages of this beautiful, uplifting story of resilience and survival., It's as much a story about resilience as it is a hard look at current systems in place to help impoverished people and how hard they are to navigate. It's eye-opening and inspiring--a definite must-read!, In a country whose frayed safety net gets less policy attention than the marginal tax rate, Land is the anomaly not only in surviving to tell the tale - and in telling it with such compelling economy., [A] heartfelt and powerful debut memoir...[a] beautiful, uplifting story of resilience and survival., What this book does well is illuminate the struggles of poverty and single-motherhood, the unrelenting frustration of having no safety net, the ways in which our society is systemically designed to keep impoverished people mired in poverty, the indignity of poverty by way of unmovable bureaucracy, and people's lousy attitudes toward poor people... Land's prose is vivid and engaging... [A] tightly-focused, well-written memoir... an incredibly worthwhile read., For readers who believe individuals living below the poverty line are lazy and/or intellectually challenged, this memoir is a stark, necessary corrective...An important memoir that should be required reading for anyone who has never struggled with poverty., Maid is an important work of journalism that offers an insightful and unique perspective on a segment of the working poor from someone who has lived it., Thebook, with its unfussy prose and clear voice, holds you. It's one woman's storyof inching out of the dirt and how the middle class turns a blind eye to thepoverty lurking just a few rungs below -- and it's one worth reading., Land's memoir forces readers to examine their implicitjudgments about what we mean by the value of hard work in America and societalexpectations of motherhood., In writing about the spaces outside of her work,though, Land gives shape tothe depleting anxiety and isolation that accompany motherhood in poverty formillions of Americans., Maid is a beautiful book and a sad book and even, at times, a joyful book--a story of a mother's love for her daughter--but most of all it's an important book about the U.S. economy and what it does to people., More than any book in recent memory, Land nails thesheer terror that comes with being poor, the exhausting vigilance of knowingthat any misstep or twist of fate will push you deeper into the hole., [Land's] book has the needed quality of reversing the direction of the gaze. Some people who employ domestic labor will read her account. Will they see themselves in her descriptions of her clients? Will they offer their employees the meager respect Land fantasizes about? Land survived the hardship of her years as a maid, her body exhausted and her brain filled with bleak arithmetic, to offer her testimony. It's worth listening to., The particulars of Land's struggle are sobering, butit's the impression of precariousness that is most memorable., Stephanie Land's heartrending book, Maid , provides a trenchant reminder that something is amiss with the American Dream and gives voice to the millions of 'working poor' toiling in a country that needs them but doesn't want to see them. 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., Her unstinting memoir [is] a portrait of working-class poverty in America...Land survived the hardship of her years as a maid, her body exhausted and her brain filled with bleak arithmetic, to offer her testimony. It's worth listening to., President Barack Obama, Summer Reading List (2019) Forbes , Most Anticipated Books of the Year Glamour , Best Books of the Year Time , 11 New Books to Read This January Vulture , 8 New Books You Should Read This January Thrillist , All the Books We Can't Wait to Read in 2019 USA Today , 5 New Books Not to Miss Amazon, Best Books of the Month Detroit News , New Books to Look Forward to in 2019 The Missoulian , Best Books of the Month San Diego Entertainer , Books to Kick Off Your New Year People , Perfect for Your Book Club Boston.com, 20 Books to Look Out for in 2019 Hello Giggles , Best New Books to Read This Week Newsweek, Best Books of 2019 So Far CNN Travel , Books You Should Read This Summer Mental Floss , Summer Reading List BookTrib, B ooks That Will Make You Look Smart at the Beach!, An empowering story of a woman determined to pull herself up in life through which we all feel stronger!" -- Gretchen Carlson, Politico, Marry the evocative first person narrative of Educated with the kind of social criticism seen in Nickel and Dimed and you'll get a sense of the remarkable book you hold in your hands. 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., Land lifts the rug on the life of the working poor in her eye-opening book...Land isn't whining or blaming, she's letting us into her life...[A] unique perspective on a segment of the working poor from someone who has lived it., Raw...Land [is] a gifted storyteller...Offers moments of levity...[ Maid ] shows we need to create an economy in which single motherhood and the risk of poverty do not go hand in hand.

Dewey Edition23

Dewey Decimal306.87432092

Edition DescriptionUnabridged edition

SynopsisEvicted 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., NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER AND INSPIRATION FOR THE NETFLIX LIMITED SERIES, HAILED BY ROLLING STONE AS "A GREAT ONE." "A single mother's personal, unflinching look at America's class divide, a description of the tightrope many families walk just to get by, and a reminder of the dignity of all work." -PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA, Obama's Summer Reading List At 28, Stephanie Land's dreams of attending a university and becoming a writer quickly dissolved when a summer fling turned into an unplanned pregnancy. Before long, she found herself a single mother, scraping by as a housekeeper to make ends meet. Maid is an emotionally raw, masterful account of Stephanie's years spent in service to upper middle class America as a "nameless ghost" who quietly shared in her clients' triumphs, tragedies, and deepest secrets. Driven to carve out a better life for her family, she cleaned by day and took online classes by night, writing relentlessly as she worked toward earning a college degree. She wrote of the true stories that weren't being told: of living on food stamps and WIC coupons, of government programs that barely provided housing, of aloof government employees who shamed her for receiving what little assistance she did. Above all else, she wrote about pursuing the myth of the American Dream from the poverty line, all the while slashing through deep-rooted stigmas of the working poor. Maid is Stephanie's story, but it's not hers alone. It is an inspiring testament to the courage, determination, and ultimate strength of the human spirit.