Class: A Memoir of Motherhood, Hunger, and Higher Education

“The stories you choose to tell are the stories that make up who you are…Whatever makes you an outsider is what makes you a writer…Ms. Land, you are the type of person this program needs the most’…’You mean working class?’” “To me, my hunger was my fault. I’d chosen to go to college instead of work full-time. I’d chosen to keep a pregnancy. I’d chosen to, what, live in a town with almost nonexistent affordable housing…My resounding conclusion was that I’d brought this on myself…What society encouraged and what it actually supported were two different things depending on what economic class you found yourself in…if I was hungry, then I couldn’t afford to aspire to anything better and I would have to keep working shit jobs that would qualify me for a small amount of money to buy food. Maybe…the real class I found myself in, amounted to that.” “It all felt like part of the ‘poor people can’t have nice things’ mandate. In this case the thing I wasn’t allowed to have was free will. How dare I make decisions for myself?...I had no tolerance for concern trolling…faking concern with an edge of judgment…To make the other person appear higher in intelligence, or even class.” “Resilience as a virtue is assigned, especially to marginalized groups, when systemic structures have created countless invisible barriers to living what the privileged consider a normal life…Immediate acceptance of any shitty situation was what most people seemed to mean by resilience.” “Resilience is a flag we poor people could wave to gain…trust…if we pulled up those fucking bootstraps so hard they broke and our response was to shrug it off before we found some way to fix them so we could immediately start pulling again–people nodded in approval [and] assigned us to the ‘deserving poor’...People thrive on success stories, and I fought like hell to be the one they wanted…My life may be relentless…but goddammit so am I.”