'Maid' Author Stephanie Land On 'Class'

Fresh Air

NPR

Tv & Film, Arts, Society & Culture, Books

4.4 • 34.4K Ratings

🗓️ 20 November 2023

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Stephanie Land's 2019 memoir Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay and a Mother's Will to Survive was a visceral portrait of living in poverty as a single mom, cleaning houses. It was a bestseller and later adapted into a critically acclaimed Netflix series. Now Land has a new book, Class, about her experience juggling college, motherhood, and work. During that time she experienced food insecurity, and struggled to get government assistance. "I see such a lack of empathy toward people who live in the margins of society," she tells Tonya Mosley.

Also, rock critic Ken Tucker reviews the new album from guitarist Marnie Stern, and David Bianculli reviews the latest season of Fargo.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Who's the NPR Super-fan in your life? Is it your uncle? Your sister? Your dog walker? Could it be you?
0:06.8	This holiday season make a proud public media nerd even prouder with a piece of
0:11.7	NPR swag from tots to decor to baseball caps and beyond,
0:16.1	tis the season to shamelessly celebrate someone's NPR nerdery.
0:20.0	Clear out your super-fans wish list at shop. npr.org.
0:25.0	This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley.
0:27.0	In the new book class, writer Stephanie Land picks up where her 2019 book, Maid, Left Off.
0:33.4	In Maid, spelled MAID, Land wrote about what it was like
0:37.6	as a young single mother living below the poverty line,
0:40.9	fleeing to a homeless shelter to get away from an abusive boyfriend, and cleaning
0:44.7	houses for a living.
0:46.6	In class, a memoir of motherhood, hunger, and higher education, Stephanie Land is in her
0:51.8	mid-30s at the University of Montana,
0:54.3	desperately trying to fulfill her dream of becoming a writer,
0:57.7	juggling classes, child care, rent, the loneliness of it all as a single mother, and a plot twist, a second pregnancy.
1:06.2	Her first book, Made, Hard Work, Low Pay, and a mother's will to survive, was picked as one of
1:12.0	former President Obama's Best Books of 2019 and made the
1:15.9	New York Times Best Seller list. It was also adapted as a Netflix series under the same
1:21.2	name in 2021.
1:23.0	And Stephanie Land, welcome back to Fresh Air.
1:26.0	Thank you for inviting me.
1:28.0	You call this time in your life
	...

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