Remember Me to My Memoir

 “Class – A Memoir of Motherhood, Hunger and Higher Education,” by Stephanie Land, 2023

This is technically a follow-up to her book and 2021 streaming series “Maid.”  (Reviewed below.)  Your first thought as a reader, if you know this, is what happened to the money she earned from that film and book?  Well, it’s not here because she evidently wrote Maid after going to the U of Montana / Missoula for writing, which is the subject of this memoir.  Here she’s still the struggling single mother, juggling her child, school, work, dates, money issues, car problems, isolation, divorce and ex-husband in a hair-raising reality that never quits.  If you’ve lived through all or parts of this – like having a child, fashioning an impossible schedule or worrying about money all the time – it will exhaust you in the telling, just as it exhausts her in the doing.

I’m not a fan of memoirs and this book hints at one reason.  Believe it or not, you are not the only one who has gone through this, or varieties of this.  But Land is pursuing a writing degree and in some sweet and unnecessary day, an MFA, so this was evidently part of her process.  For those blissfully unaware of single motherhood and divorce in poverty, this book will fill you in. For others, it might provide comfort, knowing others have the same problems you do.  For the rest – ah, reads like a mundane story about class, or a boring one about an ordinary life.  It’s not quite ‘The Jungle’ or ‘Native Son,’ but it touches on that feeling in a modern, feminist, 2023 way.  You could call it ‘poverty lite.’ 

As was noted in the review of Maid, this is a Horatia Alger story about pulling yourself along by your bootstraps.  Land is not a leftist and rarely theorizes about anything in her life.  Land has moved from Seattle to Missoula, Montana to go to university. Her daughter Emilia is finally getting into kindergarten, so now Land only has to cover Emilia’s child care on weekends, after school and evenings.  Still no small feat. The exe is repeatedly missing in action, grudging about child support, toxic to talk to and now he’s 100s of miles away.  Land’s still doing cleaning jobs and getting freebies.   She’s rock climbing and hiking, counting nickels, food stamps and filling every moment with capitalist survivalism and budgets.  As she notes, she’s spent hours convincing government aid programs she wasn’t a secret millionaire or fraud.  She delights in a court judgement forcing her exe to come up with $700 a month in child support, but this involves a further court battle.

Dating is problematic – time-consuming and chancey - while indirectly involving her daughter.  If you find her love life interesting, so be it.  I don’t. But she seems to and here’s another memoir rub.  As has been said about them, memoirs are the literary style of neo-liberalism. It’s all about me!  The problem here is the level of unnecessary and personal hum-drum detail.  I don't care what she ate for lunch at school. Her somewhat dysfunctional love life leads to pregnancy, then thoughts of an abortion.  She does not exactly know who the father is to boot.

Land’s struggles at the U of Montana are another arduous stretch.  On her arrival she’s categorized as ‘out-state.’ So she has to take out huge loans to pay the freight, and later more loans to cover costs. Her own white-collar parents, a therapist and project manager, had no interest in her going to college, claiming they couldn’t afford it.  So she’s fallen in class status by being a proletarian single mother and maid, and her father still won’t help.   Land wants to rectify this fall, and become a college professor eventually, to ascend to the professional middle class.  Knowing what we know today about the few actual tenured and high-paying positions in universities, this seems like a dicey proposition.  But that goal buttresses the ‘Horatia” side of this story.

For her pregnancy, Land visits a Missoula ‘Crisis Pregnancy Center’ that discourages abortion and decides to go through with the childbirth.  At the same time she receives a reduction in SNAP food stamps.   She then receives WIC food benefits for pregnant mothers that limits their food intake severely and she has to go to a food bank later.  Her exe challenges the divorce court increase in child support and bad-mouths her in front of Emilia.  Her ex-boyfriend is angry at her about the pregnancy.  Her daughter is having behavior problems at school.  Emilia is regularly late for school, and is starting to resist her mother.  Land has applied for her beloved MFA.  She has to juggle cleaning and a nanny job, class times, being sick and pregnancy visits too. She has to appear in court on the child support appeal, is ruled against and settles for less.  It’s a chaotic life and she has chosen some of it.

Land eventually graduates with a B.A. and has a baby girl soon after and Emilia is happy to have a baby sister.  Before she graduated, one of her longest essays in her senior independent study in writing is “Confessions of the Housekeeper,” which is probably a foreshadowing of Maid.  The prof liked it and I do too, which is why you should watch the Maid series or read the book.  Because this one, in contrast, is a slog - unless slogs are your kind of thing.

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms: “Maid,” “Horatio Alger,” “poverty.”

And I got it at the public library!

The Cultural Marxist / March 20, 2025