Maid author Stephanie Land reveals the ‘constant, crushing’ panic of her hungriest year, but this college memoir is ‘emptier’
- Written by Amber Gwynne, Associate Lecturer in Writing, The University of Queensland
It’s 2014, her senior year of college. Stephanie Land, bestselling author of Maid, is almost 35, still two years away from landing the publishing deal that will change her life.
A single parent of a six-year-old, she gulps coffee from an empty peanut-butter jar in college classes and struggles to stay awake after kindergarten drop-off. Before the year is out, she’ll be pregnant again, her circumstances infinitely harder.
Land’s mind is always somewhere else. Rent. Bills. Groceries. Medicine, if the budget will stretch that far. An abusive ex-partner who’s stingy with child support.
“It’s pretty relentless”, a college professor remarks dismissively in the feedback on one of Land’s life-writing assignments, a quibble that “throbs” in the aspiring author’s head for days afterwards.
My life may be relentless, she later writes in one of her many notebooks, but goddammit so am I.
So the days and weeks unfold in Land’s second memoir, Class, an insular but vivid reflection on a tertiary education system that seems to sabotage the very students who work hardest to be there.
Review: Class – Stephanie Land (Atria)
“Of all the things in my life that I didn’t have access to or felt like I didn’t deserve for some reason, an education hadn’t crossed my mind as a thing I wasn’t supposed to have,” Land recalls.
Yet getting an English degree while struggling to put food on the table leaves Land frequently wracked with guilt, a “constant, crushing panic”.
Pressing towards graduation, often on the brink of physical exhaustion, she reflects bitterly on the administrative hoop-jumping required of students with little financial or social support, striking at the corporatised core of higher education in America:
I had forgotten the part of the game where no one’s education mattered more than the money the university could make from your opportunity to soak up all that learning. God forbid they would make it affordable or easy.
The years she spends in snowy Missoula, Montana, are not just plagued by hunger in the literal sense. They are propelled by it too. She hankers for the respite of an easier life: financial security, reliable child care and possible entry to an MFA program.
In Maid, where Land speaks of the startling imprint of cleaning other people’s houses on her life – the vulnerabilities she’s exposed to “somehow reminding of her own” – we’re generously treated to what renowned memoirist Mary Karr calls the “totemic objects”, or the idiosyncratic details, that sophisticated writers strive to “place on every page”. The minutiae of her life — and those hers overlaps — feel real in the pungent whiff of her sick daughter’s breath, a client’s hidden cigarette stash, the flecks of vomit on an upturned toilet seat.
Class carries a greater sense of urgency, resorting to a more fervid yet mechanical style that belies its byline as a rumination on motherhood, hunger and higher education.
Land alludes to white privilege only once, commenting that her “plain” appearance has allowed her “an occasional break from my poverty, at least in terms of its visibility to others”. Of class hierarchies, she remarks fleetingly that “what society encouraged and what it actually supported were two different things depending on what economic class you found yourself in”.
Critical engagement with the intersections between identity and the ways we experience the world is noticeably absent. As a writer who labours to reveal the bergs of difficulty that may lurk beneath the appearance of success or stability, she is not always willing to excavate those depths outside her own immediate experience.
In a telling aside that mirrors the book’s inward focus, she exposes a habitual impulse for assuming her circumstances are exceptional, rarely interested enough to look deeper:
My friendships were surface level only. Not because I necessarily wanted it that way. I just didn’t have much to give back. There was so much going on in my life between work, kid, and school that I didn’t have the bandwidth to sit and listen while someone talked to me about struggles they had. When I confessed this to anyone, they invariably said that friendship was a two-way street, a give-and-take, where one person needs more support and then the other might and so on. “Yeah, but I don’t know if I will ever not need more support,” I would say.
Most baffling is Land’s treatment of her thwarted dream of enrolling in a Masters of Fine Arts (one of few anchoring elements of the narrative), when an unsympathetic college professor denies her application: “Babies don’t belong in grad school”. It’s a gut-wrenching disappointment Land brushes aside in less than a page.
Even America’s increasingly decentralised higher education system goes largely unexplained and unexamined, in a story the publisher packages as a “searing indictment”.
Class is an emptier book, hungry for the reservoir of rich episodic detail that spurred Maid to its unprecedented success as both a memoir and a televised adaptation.
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Like its author, ‘Class works hard’
Maid, however, was always going to be a tough first act to follow. The so-called “sophomore slump” (or, second-book syndrome) is a recognised phenomenon in the most ordinary of circumstances. An author whose debut has achieved bestseller status and been adapted to the screen invites inevitable comparison.
Even so, Class makes up for what it lacks in craft in its simple insistence on being heard.
Reflecting on her interactions with readers, Land explains that people often ask what motivated her to write about her own life. “The answer is both lofty and painfully basic,” she reveals at the back of Class:
On the one hand, I wanted to dismantle stigmas surrounding single moms, especially those who parent under the poverty line. On the other, I needed the money. The prospect of publishing a book wasn’t just the answer to a lifelong dream – it was the discovery of a life raft on a sinking ship.
For readers like me, who’ve floated adrift on their own sinking ships, Class may well be a life raft of another kind. Land’s relentlessness – and her strident aversion to inspirational gloss-coating – creates a redemptive space for lives messily lived, intrusively bureaucratised, and unfairly judged.
At a time when the prohibitive cost of higher education deters so many from the liberal arts (in Land’s America, but also Australia and elsewhere around the world), her story stands as an imperfect but powerful reminder that all voices matter.
Storytelling, Land reminds us, can serve a variety of purposes, discouraging silos of silence from expanding around experiences of marginalisation and expressions of outrage.
Much like Land herself, Class works hard.
It doesn’t always get where it wants to go, but there’s value in its effort.
Authors: Amber Gwynne, Associate Lecturer in Writing, The University of Queensland
Daily Bulletin
