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Maid (Questions) Maid (Questions) 1. What do you think of Stephanie Land? 2. What was Land's family background? How, in particular, would you describe her parents and the effect they may have had (or not have had) on the direction of her life? 3. What does this memoir reveal to you about life on the edge—or smack in the middle—of poverty? Consider the humiliations, the fears and anxieties, even hopelessness, and the exhaustion, both physical and mental, of Land's situation. How common do you think her experiences are? To what extent do you believe her poverty was due to her own poor choices? 4. Talk about the rules of the bureaucracy that poor people face when attempting to find assistance. Should those rules be made intentionally difficult in order to discourage their abuse? Or do the rules appear designed purposely to keep poor people mired in poverty? 5. What do you think of Jamie and his threats to apply for custody of Mia? 6. Talk about the ways in which Maid highlights the discrepancies between rich and poor? 7. What is your take-away from reading Land's memoir? Is it an eye-opener, or does it confirm your ideas of life under poverty? https://www.litlovers.com/reading-guides/non-fiction/11446-maid-land?start=3 Maid (About the Author) • Birth—ca. 1979 ​ • Where—Pacific Northwest, USA ​ • Education—B.A., University of Montana ​ • Currently—lives in Missoula, Montana ​ Stephanie Land was raising a toddler alone in Washington state, making low wages in an exhausting job as a maid, supplemented by public assistance. She was constantly broke, in a never-ending state of stress, rushing between daycare and work, and losing weight because of a scanty food budget. Land left Washington to get the education that her out-of-wedlock pregnancy derailed. In 2014 she received a bachelor’s in English and creative writing from University of Montana and lives in MIssoula. She continued to struggle, adding student-loan debt to her financial burdens, enduring an abusive marriage and divorce and raising a second child as a single woman. But she has found salvation and hope in writing, first with a blog, then by writing pieces for the Huffington Post and selling articles to top websites and newspapers like the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New York Review of Books, Vox and The Guardian. When she was in college, she wrote an essay, “Confessions of the Housekeeper.” Her professor told her it could be a book. Now it is. Land, now 40, recalls her experiences in “Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive.” Land tells heartbreaking stories of hardship, inspiring stories of resilience and infuriating tales about the callousness of strangers, relatives and friends, who judge her harshly for her poverty. Land also writes about how writing helped her focus on the good things in her life. https://www.courant.com/ctnow/arts-theater/hc-ctnow-stephanie-land-mark-twain-hartford-1120-20190118-2 i5bgng44bax5nisic6v3a4rta-story.html https://www.litlovers.com/reading-guides/non-fiction/11446-maid-land?start=1 Maid (Reviews) The author recalls a life lived on the brink, where a petty mishap can mean destitution. As a domestic cleaner “paid near minimum wage to hand-scrub shit,” she assesses empty homes with a detective’s eye: one “always seemed to be set up for a dinner party,” but dusty furniture suggests that “nights with guests and fancy meals rarely happened.” Sharing a studio apartment (and, in the winter, a bed) with her young daughter, she maintains a life of “careful imbalance” through ceaseless labor and an array of government assistance programs. The particulars of Land’s struggle are sobering, but it’s the impression of precariousness that is most memorable: “I knew that at any moment, a breeze could come and blow me away.” New Yorker Heartfelt and powerful debut memoir . 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 Vivid and visceral yet nearly unrelenting memoir . 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. —Janet Ingraham Dwyer, State Lib. of Ohio, Columbus Library Journal Detailed and insightful . Some of the most memorable scenes recount the … shaming Land received when using the food stamps to purchase groceries. An … important memoir that should be required reading for anyone who has never struggled with poverty. Kirkus Reviews The book Maid holds you. It slows down when Land dwells on the houses she ​ ​ cleaned and nicknamed (the Sad House, the Sick House, etc., which I struggled to care about), but she doesn’t linger there long. Land doesn’t indulge in diatribes or bog the pages down with obligatory data. She sticks with small details that show the cost of being poor — forgoing treatment that might relieve her chronic back pain and instead relying on costly over-the-counter meds that only mask the symptoms; not being able to afford a day off when Mia is miserably sick. Though this isn’t a policy book, and doesn’t pretend to be, it does offer a personal indictment of the policies that govern the lives of the working and lower classes. It’s also not a success story, though Land does find some just before the pages run out. “Maid” isn’t about how hard work can save you but about how false that idea is. It’s one woman’s story of inching out of the dirt and how the middle class turns a blind eye to the poverty lurking just a few rungs below — and it’s one worth reading. Washington Post Stephanie Land’s account of struggling as a maid speaks for a growing population of working people who refuse to give up hope while toiling within a system that increasingly gives up on them. Her book smashes the myth that the poor double as welfare profiteers. And until we realize how shame and accountability keep people on the dole, we need more books like this one. The National Book Review https://www.litlovers.com/reading-guides/non-fiction/11446-maid-land?start=2 https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/from-middle-class-to-homeless-a-mothers-unapologetic-memoir/2 019/02/01/e4db6410-137c-11e9-b6ad-9cfd62dbb0a8_story.html https://www.thenationalbookreview.com/features/2019/2/20/review-what-is-it-like-to-be-a-maid-stephanie-la nd-tells-all https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/02/18/maid-all-the-lives-we-ever-lived-an-orchestra-of-minoritie s-and-aladdin Maid (Enhancements) MAID is also being published in several foreign languages with print editions available now, or in the coming months, in the following countries: Brazil, China, France, Italy, Japan, Korea, Poland, Russia, Serbia, Taiwan, Ukraine, United Kingdom, and Vietnam. Stephanie Land’s Interview: How long did it take you to write MAID? ​ Writing and working on a book are similar actions to me. When I worked as a freelancer with a newborn and active seven-year-old, I’d spend all day thinking over an essay or article, taking notes here and there, then writing it all out at night in a matter of minutes after the girls were asleep. This book was written in the same way, just on a much larger scale. After spending almost a year planning it through perfecting a proposal with my agent, the actual writing process was pretty quick. A friend of mine suggested going straight through–start to finish without looking back or editing–until I was done, and that’s what I did. At first I tried to keep up with freelancing, then discovered, after four months, that I was a third of the way into my year to complete a memoir manuscript and had barely 15,000 words. So, I buckled down, and kept a tally of how many words I’d added to the total amount every day. Some days were only 1,000, others were closer to 4,000 or more. While the physical action of typing out a complete 75,000-word manuscript on my tiny 11-inch MacBook Air only took three or four months, I’d spent years working through the content in my head, chewing on it in my mind, mentally going over the pieces of the arc and how I would shape it into a story. Then, there came the edits, which took another three straight months of constant work, six-to-twelve-hour days, from November to January, only taking Christmas off. Whenever people ask me this question, I give them the short answer of six or seven months. That seems like a good number. What was the inspiration for MAID? MAID began as an essay I wrote in college. Disregard whatever image that ​ conjures in your mind. I was in my third year, in my first writing workshop, taught by David Gates, a real writer, and I had to come up with ten pages to submit to the rest of the class, most of whom were ten years younger than me and whose essays could be summed up with one of two titles: “My last year of high school and my first year of college” and “The year I went abroad.” My classmates didn’t know what to say about an essay written by a 33-year-old single mom who had to scramble from scrubbing toilets to picking up a kid at preschool, her car breaking down along the way.
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