Stephanie Land’s new memoir, Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive, is a bracing one: When Land was 28 and unexpectedly got pregnant, she threw out her plans to study creative writing at the University of Montana in favor of raising her child. But with little support from the father and no close relatives who could help out in any meaningful way, Land soon found herself in a homeless shelter in Washington State with her tiny daughter, Mia.
In the years following, Land took on a series of low-paying jobs, familiarized herself with the convoluted system of government benefits, and eventually found relatively steady work cleaning houses with a maid service, all while still hoping to one day earn her degree. Most of Maid chronicles those years, the ones Land spent scrubbing toilets during the day and completing college credits online and writing essays and blog posts on her laptop after Mia had gone to bed.
Maid is a wide-ranging work, about not just the social and emotional realities of being poor, but also the monetary and opportunity costs of single parenthood and the secret lives of houses when only maids are around to get to know them. I spoke to Land about what she saw during those years and what life has been like ever since for her and for Mia, who’s now 11 and a half.
[For more on this story by ASHLEY FETTERS, go to https://www.theatlantic.com/fa...ephanie-land/581362/]
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