Book cover
Start from one mistake, one that is tragically common - becoming a parent a little to young.  From that point, almost everything that can go wrong in someone's life while still making the best possible choice for the circumstance is laid out in the first four chapters of this book.  This beginning is a treatise on despair and government anti-poverty programs.

The arc doesn't exactly get better from there, but it starts to be framed in a way that shows gratitude for the things that haven't gone completely wrong, though things do continue to go wrong.  It reminds me of parts of my own childhood being raised by a single mom.  Those memories of being able to do the really simple things that don't cost a lot of money.

There is a lot to unpack here about how poor people are treated as fundamentally broken and lazy.  This is a really good reminder that people are people, and that the hardest working among us often do get the least reward.

Some of my most well-off acquaintances truly believe that they got there through smart-decisions and being willing to put in the work: That luck has very little to do with it.  Those are the people that I really think should skip this book.  I think they'd get the wrong thing from it.  Ultimately this is a memoir from a New York Times Best-Selling Author.  Someone who, through smart-decisions and being willing to put in the work, climbed out of poverty.  In a strange way, this book would only prove the narrative that merit is all it takes.

Read this if you want to go on a journey through some beautiful places in the Pacific North-West while experiencing some truly painful arcs.  Like any good memoir, I come away from this book feeling like I know the author, and really like her as a person.  Maybe you'll feel the same.  Trigger warnings for domestic violence, emotional abuse, medical gore, hoarding and bodily fluids.

Maid
Memoir
Hachette Books
Released: 22 January 2019
Hardcover, 288 pages