Bone of the Bone, page 1
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For the unseen
INTRODUCTION
My early career as a journalist coincided with the collapse of the newspaper industry. A generation prior, I might have spent years filing stories for the same newsroom. Instead, following my graduation with degrees in journalism and English in 2002, out of economic necessity my writing took many forms: daily news stories for struggling midsize papers, culture pieces for alternative weeklies in major cities, travel features for global airline magazines, even grant proposals for statewide social service agencies.
Meanwhile, through my twenties I tended my yearning to go deep and long with narrative; many nights, I worked on a book about my rural, working-poor family. (Other nights, to make ends meet, I poured whiskey at a biker bar on Interstate 70.)
Along the way, I earned an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University, taught journalism as an adjunct at a small private university, and became a tenured professor of nonfiction writing at a midsize public university. My writing labors turned academic; amid teaching undergraduates, I revamped the English department’s journal, wrote research papers, organized author lectures, sat on writing-conference panels. Even then, to augment my modest salary, I remained an ink-stained hustler. During one summer break, I researched and wrote two pop-history books for a small publisher in order to pay for my own wedding.
While it required dexterity to do so, I was fortunate to make—or half make—a living as a writer through that perilous new digital moment when print journalism became “content,” TV news became “infotainment,” local newspapers and even major magazines folded, and media in general became more urban, more coastal, more class-privileged. One former colleague after another was laid off by some news organization and found work in public relations—in many cases, creating the spin we were trained to outsmart in pursuit of facts. A decade into my career, among my graduating class from a venerable journalism school, I was one of the last reporters standing.
Simultaneous with this historic, consequential reshaping of an industry, a more personal tension pressed against my journalistic calling: where I came from.
My first news story distributed by the Associated Press, in 2001, when I was a college senior, had documented classist frameworks for determining student financial need at the US Department of Education. Ever since, my work had exposed various sorts of marginalization. I never set out with such a mission. Rather, as a woman out of rural poverty, my own marginalization—not just in our society but in the newsrooms covering it—trained my eye on injustice.
As political and cultural fractures deepened during the Obama era, I saw that the increasingly corporatized, digitized, and monopolized news industry didn’t just have blind spots. Rather, it viewed places like my home at the center of the country through a telescope from a faraway dimension and, worse, pronounced its misunderstandings with palpable smugness.
Many fine, underpaid journalists preserved local reporting in such places wherever possible. These were no “media elites,” to be sure. Yet, even they were from a different world, a place where parents had college degrees, kids went to summer camp, clothes came brand-new from the mall, and no one had ever eaten turtle caught from a cattle watering hole—conditions my own family regarded as “rich.”
By the 2012 presidential election, when I was in my early thirties, I had left academia. I had left a marriage too. I had left, as I reference in more than one of these collected essays, assorted manner of bullshit. A cleared vessel, I could feel my voice throbbing in my throat, aching to scream what few, if any, in mainstream news media could see or name: the multipronged classism of these United States and related stereotypes about rural America.
I felt that I could be of best service to my profession not only by reporting objective information about those matters but by contextualizing them with subjective personal truth. That effort should not be the detached analysis of the op-ed pages, I thought, but a direct witnessing.
Such a turn involved several obstacles.
To begin with, entering the story is generally frowned upon by reporters of a certain era, those who taught me that “I” is an embarrassing pox upon the dissemination of facts. (That shame is applied selectively; those same reporters tend to venerate the White, male, upper-middle-class gonzo “journalists” of the mid–twentieth century who not only employed the first person but wholly fictionalized their accounts whenever it suited them.) For years I had successfully compartmentalized my journalistic work and a years-long memoir project, allowing the first person into the latter but never the former. While I remain a purist about conveying facts—in my work, no direct quote shall be altered, no detail shall be conjured, and even in memoir the fallibility of memory shall be acknowledged—I had come to believe that personal perspective might deepen the resonance of those facts without blurring their edges.
This interior triumph, overriding a learned distaste for my own voice, had difficult timing. My country was not ready to hear what I had to say. Or, rather, the gatekeepers of an increasingly exclusive industry were not ready to let me be heard. For several years, even as I landed a couple major digital bylines for Harper’s reporting on a state constitutional crisis over school funding in Kansas, my essays on class were turned down repeatedly by newspapers and magazines. The first such essay of mine to go viral, a 2014 examination of access to dentistry as class signifier, was rejected by multiple US outlets before finally being published by the digital magazine Aeon, based in London—a place that, while no less rife with class problems, differs from mine for having discussed those problems for centuries.
Then there was the matter of needing to eat. The first essay in this collection, a 2013 piece for the Huffington Post—notoriously built on the labor of unpaid writers seeking a “platform”—received zero compensation, though I was no fledgling journalist; I was thirty-three and had been a professional writer for more than a decade. Two years later, for a New Yorker digital piece about laws that unfairly punish the poor, also included here, I received—for at least forty cumulative hours of research, writing, and responding to the meticulous editing and fact-checking that makes the New Yorker a standard-bearer worldwide—$250. Within hours of its publication, my excellent editor there, whom I trust was working with a scant budget of someone else’s design, emailed to say the piece was the second most popular read at the New Yorker website.
Being underpaid by the world’s eminent newspapers and magazines for illuminating socioeconomic struggle would become the central paradox of my work as an essayist—an insult that validates the points I make in their pages about undervalued labor and the chattering classes who can afford to write for peanuts since their wealth is assured by other means.
Due to the biases of such publications, preserving the dignity of the people I document often has required running defense against edits, headlines, or accompanying photographs and illustrations that conveyed the very stereotypes against which I wrote. If I filed a two-thousand-word, thoroughly researched piece on, say, the large, diverse minority of liberals and progressives in “red states,” without my vigilance it would be packaged with a headline such as “A Different Perspective from Trump Country” and a photo of round White men wearing red “Make America Great Again” hats. In the fast media landscape, these trimmings affect a reader’s posture before she ever reads my words. I have been largely successful in my requests that editors and art departments eschew these clichés, but such requests by a freelance writer are generally considered audacious.
I summon that audacity on behalf of the poor and the working class not because they are a sentimentalized ideal from my past—some salt of the earth I reflect on from an apartment building with a doorman—but because they are the complicated, human core of my present. They are my neighbors in rural Kansas. They are my blood. They are the foundation of who I am and the reason my voice exists. Their relentless portrayal as scapegoats for a nation’s ills evoked in me a relentless rebuttal—which, across publications, required repetition of specific points that I hope you’ll forgive in this collected format.
I have written about them in specific, individual terms only when I had their blessing to do so. While I will not claim that it has always been easy for the people described in these essays to see their private traumas and shames offered up to the masses as evidence of socioeconomic injustice, I have never sought a blessing that wasn’t given.
The sharing of intimate information—in my case, not just the details of my life but my voice—isn’t easy for me either. It might surprise readers to learn that I am one of the most private people I know; my memoir books and essays are by no means a litany of the worst or most shocking things I’ve experienced but rather have been selectively rendered to illuminate our shared public concerns. My impulse toward withdrawal and self-protection in today’s garishly confessional world is often painfully at odds with my obvious calling to be heard. The essays in this book differ in form and theme; they range from political commentary to media critique, from reportage to memoir, from policy analysis to cultural criticism. They frequentl
Despite these barriers, the essays in this collection (and many more, left out) entered the world. Because they did, I met some people who changed my life.
I met the literary agent who represents me, the editor who shepherds the books I write, the publishing house that pays me very well for those books, even major celebrities who publicly endorsed my work. But I met someone else who, in some ways, changed my life even more.
I met you.
Many thousands of you, relieved to read about the aspect of American identity for so long ignored that you struggled to articulate it about your own lives.
You are poor. You have never contacted a writer before. You joined the military to pay for college, or you were homeless for twenty years. You can’t get Medicaid to cover the treatment you need because you smoke. At a free dental clinic, they pulled out all your teeth. You knew I was the real deal because I wrote about the good times poor folks enjoy. You would rather be a toothless old witch laughing with her friends at Dollar General than the queen of England, because you couldn’t live with yourself hoarding so much material wealth.
Or you used to be poor, and now you aren’t. You are from a working-class family in Pennsylvania and attended an elite university, or you grew up in the South Bronx and now afford things your family of origin can’t. You feel emboldened to call out class condescension. You are from Somalia and now study at a state university in North Dakota. You are wondering, how do I navigate the feeling of isolation both where I began and where I’ve landed? You are from the Appalachian Mountains and feel like an alien at the office. You are twenty-three and feel like you’ve lived decades longer, or you are sixty-two and will never forget how your father brought home roadkill and fried the meat. You were raised on tribal lands, which is a rural experience. You loved reading about the three-wheeler, which reminded you of your grandparents’ house, where you spent a lot of time for complicated reasons. You feel like you aren’t as good as other people, even though intellectually you know that’s not right. Your White mom met your dad, a recent Vietnamese immigrant, while working at a drill bit manufacturing company. A guy from the city bought your mom’s farmhouse, and later you discovered a blog post he wrote about the “redneck refuge” she left behind. You are from Louisiana and believe my White grandmother and your Black mother might be the same woman. You are a Bay Area director crying on your way to work. You are no longer humiliated by someone else’s descriptions of your background. You define yourself.
Or you never were poor. You are a physician who treats elderly immigrants in Massachusetts, a relatively generous state, and even there your patients struggle to access care. You are a dairy farmer in upstate New York, getting by but angry about corporate greed. You are a young television writer who will be following my work. You are a Swedish woman who wants me to know that, despite the social safety nets, class is a problem in your country too. You are a White man who volunteers on the board of a health clinic and admires the clinic’s toughest staff worker, who used to be in a gang in California. You will remember what I wrote and meet people where they are without pity or condescension.
This dialogue we have found over the years is the honor of my life. I hope you will share with others what you have shared with me. If you do, we will transcend the failing of newspapers and the rise of social media, which eventually will fail too. So long as we keep talking—bearing witness to our own truths while staying humble to what other eyes have seen and open to the facts that would disrupt our assumptions—we will uncover the single, unchanging reality that we are all writing, reading, posting, sharing, and speaking toward: our connection to one another.
Sometimes, “I” is just another word for “we” or “you.” The White, rural, working-poor people about whom I most often write—they are your people too.
August 31, 2023
HOW I MOVED TWENTY-ONE TIMES BEFORE COLLEGE Parcel, 2013
1. Decision. Maybe it was made of necessity—a rent payment couldn’t be made, a job beckoned on the other side of town, a cruel or wishy-washy or absent husband made a place unbearable. This place doesn’t have a good vibe was reason enough, because the reasons didn’t matter so much. Reasons were intangible or, at best, details. Action was real life.
2. Notification. Tell the boss, call the utility companies. One last outing at the bar with friends from work, maybe. Family members might receive a casual announcement, at the last minute. Mom told me about her first divorce while we were folding towels on top of the dryer, and neither of us cried. I tried to hide my excitement as I asked to call my only friend on our rural party line to break the news. My dad embraced a drunken depression, as any rational person might, but Mom had about her a thrill, a cat’s quickened scratching at the door upon sensing that it soon would open. While Dad silently moped off to construction sites and wheat fields, she filled out change-of-address forms and made to-do lists in gorgeous cursive on dollar-store legal pads. (Also an option: Leave now, report later.)
3. Sorting. We did the grunt work ourselves, of course. I had no idea a professional moving industry existed. We gathered cardboard boxes from grocery stores, avoiding those that had stored produce, as they smelled rotten and had big, square holes in the bottoms. But before we could stuff them with shirts and papers and pictures from drawers, plates and vases from cabinets, wrenches and canned food from basements, we made two piles: things we’d keep, and things for the garage sale to be hosted by whichever family member lived on the highest-traffic street of Wichita at the moment. I spread my toys across my bedroom floor and discerned what I really needed. I implored my four-year-old brother to consider that he never played with that G.I. Joe anyway. Mom was in the living room getting down to business. Hand-sewn Halloween costumes of Dorothy, the Scarecrow, an Indian girl? Halloween is over. Almost-new lamp? Reminds me of the ex-husband who bought it. Coffee table? Piece of junk from someone else’s garage sale anyhow. Into the sale pile. Sarah, have you seen my lighter?
4. Sale. The night before our sales, which we called garage sales even when they took place on driveways or front yards, I made signs with cardboard and black, inch-thick markers that squeaked as I colored in the arrows that would point bargain hunters our way. I made the signs because everyone knew I could draw a straight line. Mom, a saleswoman, knew the best price to write on adhesive tags, and Grandma Betty was a formidable opponent in haggling matches. Aunt Pud was good at spotting thieves, and her boyish daughter Shelly could carry a solid oak headboard on one arm. We all had our specializations. On the eve of a sale, after sorting and pricing and spreading items onto long card tables to be kept in the closed garage until early morning, we rigged the homemade sale signs to impromptu stakes, taking care that arrows on opposite sides of the sign pointed in the same direction. We loaded the signs into a pickup bed and lurched around the neighborhood of the moment, the driver idling the engine as the rest of us jumped from pickup to curb, laughing in the darkness as we pounded the stakes into hard earth with hammers. At least one sign would give us trouble, refusing to pierce the ground deeply enough to be stable; at sunrise, when someone went to get a fast-food breakfast and a newspaper—to check on the classified ad we took out (HUGE SALE)—the stubborn sign would have fallen. But we counted ourselves lucky if it hadn’t rained overnight and made a soggy mess of the cardboard.
If the newspaper ad said the sale started at 8 a.m. on Thursday, the female bargain warriors arrived before seven, their hair wet in the early summer sun, faces makeup-free, agendas fierce.
Do you have any lamps, what do you want for the mirror, and would you take a quarter for these tennis shoes because they’re pretty dirty.
Male patrons often were war veterans who wanted to chat about the old days; they sought tools and antique toys, maybe some dated electronics.
