Stephanie Land's 2019 memoir Maid has been adapted into an acclaimed Netflix miniseries. (If you don't have Netflix but are interested in watching Maid, it's not currently available on DVD but you can borrow MHL's Roku with Netflix access.) If you found Land's struggle to raise her daughter and stay financially afloat compelling, you might appreciate these other memoirs and works of investigative nonfiction about work, class, and family in America.
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Maid : hard work, low pay, and a mother's will to survive
by Stephanie Land An economic-hardship journalist describes the years she worked in low-pay domestic work under wealthy employers, contrasting the privileges of the upper-middle class to the realities of the overworked laborers supporting them. |
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Nickel and dimed : on (not) getting by in America
by Barbara Ehrenreich The sharp social critic and author of Blood Rites looks underneath the illusion of American prosperity at poverty and hopelessness in America. |
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Caste : the origins of our discontents
by Isabel Wilkerson The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Warmth of Other Suns identifies the qualifying characteristics of historical caste systems to reveal how a rigid hierarchy of human rankings, enforced by religious views, heritage and stigma, impact everyday American lives. |
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Heartland : a memoir of working hard and being broke in the richest country on Earth
by Sarah Smarsh A journalist born into a Kansas farming family relates her experience growing up among the working poor, discussing the impact of intergenerational poverty on individuals, families, and communities. |
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Nomadland : surviving America in the twenty-first century
by Jessica Bruder An award-winning journalist sets out on the road to explore the new phenomenon of “workampers” who are migrant workers made up of transient older Americans who took to the road after discovering that their social security came up short and their mortgages were underwater. |
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Evicted : poverty and profit in the American city
by Matthew Desmond A Harvard sociologist examines the under-represented challenge of eviction as a formidable cause of poverty in America, revealing how millions of people are wrongly forced from their homes and reduced to cycles of extreme disadvantage that are reinforced by dysfunctional legal systems. |
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Somebody's daughter : a memoir
by Ashley C. Ford One of the prominent voices of her generation, the author presents this coming-of-age recollection of a childhood defined by the ever looming absence of her incarcerated father and a traumatic event, revealing the threads between who you are and what you are born into. |
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$2.00 a day : living on almost nothing in America
by Kathryn Edin A revelatory assessment of poverty in America examines the survival methods employed by households with virtually no income to illuminate disturbing trends in low-wage labor and income inequality. |
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The girl who smiled beads : a story of war and what comes after
by Clemantine Wamariya Traces the author's harrowing experiences as a young child during the Rwanda massacres and displacements, which separated her from her parents and forced the author and her older sister to endure six years as refugees in seven countries, foraging for survival and encountering unexpected acts of cruelty and kindness before she was granted asylum in a profoundly different America. |
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Educated : a memoir
by Tara Westover Traces the author's experiences as a child born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, describing her participation in her family's paranoid stockpiling activities and her resolve to educate herself well enough to earn an acceptance into a prestigious university and the unfamiliar world beyond. |
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Born bright : a young girl's journey from nothing to something in America
by C. Nicole Mason The author describes the path she took to escape poverty, after being raised by a 16-year-old single mother in 1970s Los Angeles, and examines the conditions that make it nearly impossible for others to replicate her journey. |
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Broke : hardship and resilience in a city of broken promises
by Jodie Adams Kirshner Traces the experiences of seven Detroit residents throughout the city’s 2013 bankruptcy, revealing the larger human ramifications of poor urban policies, restorative negligence and municipal distress for hundreds of thousands living below the poverty line. |
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Hand to mouth : living in bootstrap America
by Linda Tirado A first book by a widely read, controversial essayist on poverty profiles the realities of the working poor in America and why poor people make decisions that are popularly criticized. |
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Gang leader for a day : a rogue sociologist takes to the streets
by Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh Recounts the full story of a young sociologist whose infiltration of a Chicago drug gang was originally introduced in the work Freakonomics, in a firsthand account that describes the author's grad student idealism, his friendship with gang leader JT, and his seven-year witness to the organization's complex crack-selling trade. |
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White trash : the 400-year untold history of class in America
by Nancy Isenberg A history of the class system in America from colonial times to the present illuminates the crucial legacy of the underprivileged white demographic, challenging popular notions about equality while citing the pivotal contributions of lower-class white workers in wartime, social policy and the rise of the Republican party. |