In the Newsweek of May 14, 2012, Kent Sepkowitz wrote an article entitled “Equine Opportunity? It’s Time to Face the Facts on Expensive Medical Treatment” in which he argues that people like me should be left to die. I’m not sure if he wants us to die, but he says that “as a society we cannot afford” treatment for people like me. Maybe he wants us all to go to Canada.

He isn’t taking on cancer, or end-stage life support, or long-term hospitalization. Instead, he’s taking on chronic illness like MS (the headline comes from Ann Romney’s passion for horseback riding, which she credits with keeping her active despite her MS).  Egregiously, Sepkowitz includes the cost of dressage horses as part of the implicit total in treating chronic illness. These funny-sounding disease names are mysterious because the public doesn’t know what these various conditions really mean. So they’re easier to pick on.

His real point, however, is that “[d]rugs with unwieldy names” are too expensive. Wow, they cost $30,000 to $40,000 a year. I don’t know if that is equal to the mortgage payment on Sepkowitz’s second home, but it’s too much to keep someone with a chronic condition alive. That amount–let’s say $35,000, or $2916 a month–is not too much to keep someone alive and functioning.

I could argue this from a moral standpoint, but this article seems to have throw that stance out the window. Instead, let me argue for my own financial worth. I am not yet on drugs that cost $2916 a month, but I could very well be. I have rheumatoid arthritis, and those immuno-suppressive drugs cost just as much as the immuno-suppressive drugs used to treat MS. I am the primary breadwinner in my family, and I have spent a good chunk of time not only paying my own expenses but raising a child. I’m a caretaker, so in addition to having paid into Social Security since I was 16, I am contributing to the care of others. I’m a teacher. I plan to have a long and productive career. Maybe that’s being extravagant. But I think my life is worth $2916 a month, especially since that cost is big, big money to pharmaceutical companies getting rich off that drug and to insurance companies doling out that treatment in tiny increments with hefty co-pays and premiums that I shoulder.

Yes, I’m productive, and the Newsweek article (under the heading “Health” instead of “Political Screeds”) is accompanied by a graphic of an elderly woman in a walker and hospital gown. I’m not there yet. I would like elderly people and middle-aged people with chronic conditions to be able to live productive lives.

Here’s another issue, Mr. Sepkowitz: If you stop treating people like me, we don’t die fast. Instead, we die excruciatingly slow and painful deaths that will require expensive hospitalization and long-term disability. I would go from being a productive worker to a drain on your spreadsheets. I’d go to the emergency room and beg for pain pills. I might even get addicted to them. My family would fall apart. Someone would have to take care of my son. Someone would have to pay my bills. You’d have to institutionalize me for a looooong time before I’d finally kick it, and then more expensive sick people would take my place.

Sepkowitz doesn’t know it, but the real problem is the private healthcare system that allows these drugs to be sold for outrageous profits. But then, he might know someone who has shares in a pharmaceutical company, someone whose stock options might total much more than the cost of keeping a handful of people alive. But they’re not rich and powerful, so I suppose they’re too expensive.

If you have a chronic condition that requires a drug with an “unwieldy name,” (unlike a decongestant?!?) or if you love someone who has one, please contact Newsweek: letters@newsweek.com.

A memoirist’s work these days can often involve reading statements about the badness, self-centered, or non-artistic nature of our work. Do you need me to provide links? There are many, but Neil Genzlinger‘s article, “The Problem with Memoirs,” in the New York Times, seems to sum it up. These are different than controversies over the truthiness of a particular memoir or piece of literary nonfiction, because the specific controversies often delve deeply into the works themselves and talk about them. That deep delving and reading and discussing is almost always a very productive thing, even if nothing about the nature of truthiness gets resolved. (How could it?) In any case, the challenge with the controversies is not the controversies themselves. It is that the controversies are then used by others as logs on the fire to attempt to burn memoir as a genre. (My metaphor kind of got away from me. It’s not actually that Joan-of-Arc-ish, but you know what I mean).

Granted, I probably shouldn’t take these statements personally. They usually betray both a lack of understanding about the scope of the genre itself as well as a lack of reading in the genre. The statements sadden me because they remind me of how much great and beautiful writing is lumped into a term, and how that term itself is then used to excuse not investigating the genre further.

For that reason, I am always delighted to collect proof from the outside world about the contributions that memoir can make.  Well, the outside world constantly delivers that proof in terms of readers and a great community of supportive writers. Maybe I also hunger for support from the “inside” world–academics doing “official” things and studying reality with a bit of distance. And that’s why I get happy when both literary folks and history folks in particular talk about the value of memoir.

This came my way today via Inside Higher Ed: Dr. G. Thomas Couser of Hofstra University writes:

In American literary history, memoir has long functioned as the threshold genre through which various minorities and marginalized populations have gained access to the realm of literature.  Consider the antebellum slave narrative, which first empowered African Americans to tell their lives. In the late twentieth century, memoir surges have tracked successive rights movements: the Civil Rights movement, the women’s liberation movement, the gay rights movement, and the disability rights movement. Of these, the last most vividly illustrates the genre’s accessibility; in recent years memoir has issued from people whose conditions were once believed to utterly preclude self-representation–locked-in syndrome, Down syndrome, autism, and early Alzheimer’s.

Of course, as its critics claim, much memoir is self-aggrandizing, trashy, and not worth your time. But before you dismiss memoir in its entirety, remember that it has served historically–and still functions–to make visible lives that once were lived in the shadows–or were considered not worth living, let alone writing.

I think Couser’s point is central to the problem with memoirs. Many of them irritate critics precisely because their content and the lives they describe also irritate notions of the status quo.

But as a collector of these various clips of academic friends telling us we exist, I would be remiss if I made it sound as thought the excellent Dr. Couser was alone. I also read and loved a book by historian Jennifer Jensen Wallach, Closer to the Truth Than Any Fact: Memoir, Memory, and Jim Crow, that you can read if you ever get sad about doing your work for nothing. One of her huge points is the validity of using memoir as historical documentation for studying a particular time period.

She writes:

“Skillful autobiographers are uniquely equipped to describe the entire universe as it appeared from an acknowledged perspective. Skillfully executed life writing has the ability to portray the complicated interplay between thoughts and emotions of a historical actor. Furthermore, autobiographers intermingle historical data about what actually happened with reflections on what the author wishes had happened or imagines had happened. A full-fledged understanding of a particular historical moment must capture the complexities of the cognitive and the affective, the factual and the imaginary, perceptions and misperceptions. These elements are constitutive of a complex historical reality, which exists from the perspective of the people who inhabited a past social world. The thought and feelings of historical agents are not responses to a preexisting social reality. Rather, they are reality. If we are to come to a deep understanding of a historical moment, we must endeavor to understand the individual experiences that constituted it. No other single source of historical evidence can capture these intricacies as effectively as a literary memoir.” (4)

and also:

“Autobiographers frequently assume the role of lay sociologist and cultural critic, and they always function as a cultural anthropologist of sorts—for what are autobiographers if not participant-observers living their life with a critical eye and then reporting their findings later?” (5)

The idea of this book is to examine Jim Crow era autobiography but also to argue for the validity of memoir as a historian’s tool. I found the book completely by accident at a book fair, and I’m so glad I did.

I think we often focus on what memoir does for us–is it healing, is it fair to our subjects and the people depicted–and I think wrestling with those ethical difficulties is actually *part* of doing memoir work. But all the same, I like the idea of branching out of fields of study to see ourselves from the outside. If anyone has other examples of memoir as used in other fields of study, please let me know.

I’m happy to have been invited to have a section of Cover Me included in the forthcoming book,  American Creative Writers on Class. Editor Shelly Reed, who steers Big Wonderful Press, has masterminded the project, and the profits from the book sales will go to the Robin Hood Foundation. Other authors include: Oliver de la Paz, Rebecca Keith, Matthea Harvey, Colleen McKee, Carolyne Wright, Emmy Hunter, Dorianne Laux, Monica A. Hand, Michele Carlo, Leslie Jamison, Caitlin Doyle, Christina Olson, Laura McCullough, and Theresa Rodopoulos. I am so excited to be in such company! There’s a book launch reading on Monday, Feb. 27, at a neat-looking performance space called the powerHouse Arena in Brooklyn, NY at 7 pm.

On writing essays, from the introduction to Gritos by Dagoberto Gilb: “I assure you, every one of them has given me such pleasure and satisfaction, the same kind I had when I used to cut wood with my skilsaw and drive nails and build…. Each word is a rock I’ve placed personally into a wall–five go in and I pick through a pile and find another, shift them all around until it’s right. I’ve chipped and nicked at most so they look to me like good sentences, good paragraphs. If I don’t think of myself as the smartest, I do feel a strength in my working of the craft, so that every time I finish something, I’m maybe too proud of myself, can hardly believe that I did it, that I could. The words are beyond my own physical self or nature, because I was not born to be a writer, I’ve just done it anyway. Often this work is outright fun, almost as fun as a good construction job where we were all muscles sweating and laughing and building shit and getting paid at the same time–living and working–except writing work is alone, only an imaginary crew.” (Introduction, xiv)

I wrote this piece during the summer and finally gave up trying to get it published in a progressive magazine. It’s about the “working class,” a title that I suppose sounds old and clunky or sectarian to some editors–but not to me.

I’m posting it here because a great article in Inside Higher Education this morning, “Welcome to the Occupation,” talks about the potential strengths of an Occupy Wall Street movement that defined itself by what it IS more specificially, i.e. people that work for a living. The important thing for me, in thinking about the “producerist” outlook mentioned in the article, is that accessible theories about social class have not kept up with the work we do. So we need a term to group our new jobs–from barista to call center worker, from office coordinator to bike messenger, from nonprofit drone to copyeditor, from daycare worker to home health aid, from small business owner with a staff of 2 doing masonry work to waitress. They are jobs that are often assumed to be not “working class” or “blue collar” because they’re feminized and low status or just not thought about. They are “white collar” or “pink collar” or “no collar,” but color coding isn’t as helpful these days. These jobs are part of how work looks now, and they are all hard work, and they are manned and woman-ed by working people. Not the “middle class.” Whatever the middle class is…. I don’t know.

What are you? Really? Are you middle class—and what is “middle class,” anyway?

During the recent takeover of the Capitol building in Wisconsin in response to attacks on public-sector unions, I watched many YouTube videos and cheered and crossed my fingers and sent money. But I sat up straight and scowled in confusion as I heard more than one speaker during that event claim to be defending the “middle class.” Is that why thousands rushed to the rallies? The reality is that not everyone who is a teacher or a nurse is middle class. Two of these incomes—or one long-term career—might vault you into this category. But there isn’t room for everyone in the middle class. Right now, an unfortunate overlap of Left and Right rhetoric has left a huge practical hole, and we have few words to describe the lives that most of us are living—on the edge between middle class and poverty. I think maybe more of us might be working class than we know.

I’m going to hazard a guess about your situation. If you’re a few paychecks away from being homeless, I think you might be working class. If you don’t own two houses and don’t have a bunch of cash stashed away, if your family makes under about $75,000 per year, you’re working class. Even if you happen to have scored a sweet job somewhere and you’re edging into the middle class, you’re not that safe. I don’t mean to be a downer, especially when things are depressing already. But wishing won’t change reality. You can lose your job and be right back at the bottom.

Karl Marx studied woodcutters to formulate his theories of the working class—but today in the United States, cutting and hauling wood by hand isn’t exactly a growth industry. Max Weber, who knew nothing of adjunct rebellions, defined the “upper middle class” as those who have advanced degrees. I’m going to bet you know a Ph.D. student working at Starbucks. Even terms like “blue collar” and “white collar” are inadequate for describing call-center sweatshops and data entry carpal-tunnel mines. We’re in an information-driven globalized economy, and we need to be as bold as the corporate sector in understanding where we’re at—on our own terms.

So where did the term “working class” go? In a recent article in Guernica, The American Dream as We Know It Is Dead, Arun Gupta explained the history of the right-wing push to stamp out working-class organizing and even the identity of being working class. Meanwhile, liberals and the heads of centrist labor unions shied away from the term “working class” and its Cold-War-tinged associations in hopes of being rescued by capitalism. Gupta presents a concise and compelling overview. What tripped me up was the statement that “it is almost impossible to find working-class culture or life beyond the market and corporate media.” I think this view collapses a huge economic, social, and cultural group with the ideal of highly organized and radical working-class communities whose members are conscious of their rank on the economic ladder. Organizers would prefer the latter, but our fantasies shouldn’t blind us to the reality that’s all around us. As a person trying desperately to grow my own politics and understand my own life in political terms in my twenties, I only got the hazy sense that if I didn’t work in a steel mill, I was inherently bourgeois and middle class. From the left, the liberal, and the right, the working class was as difficult to find as Santa Claus.

Meanwhile, you might think that someone somewhere at the federal level has a chart that clearly defines the issue. But no—there’s just more erasure. President Obama gave Vice President Biden the job of launching The White House’s Middle Class Task Force. On its website, Biden appears on a short video to say that a “strong middle class equals a strong America.” So how do I join?

It’s easy. The site explains that middle class is—by the U.S. Federal government—now defined by “aspiration”: “Middle class families share an aspiration to own a home and car, to send their kids to college, and to take occasional family vacations, all while maintaining health and retirement security. This understanding of the middle class also helps explain why so many people identify with this group so consistently through time.” This tiny site is tragedy writ small, a circular definition that attempts to shore up the failing American Dream with wishes. These goals should definitely not be reserved for those who want to be middle class. Most people who have received a degree and been hired in the last decade have worn through the illusion that an education and a job will make you middle class. The horrible reality betrayed by this site and most class rhetoric is that once you fall off the lower edge of the “middle class,” you’re suddenly defined as poor. Maybe that’s why people are so anxious to scramble into what they think is middle class.

Polls put the middle-class income at anywhere between $45,000 and $100,000 (with variations for educational opportunities, assets, culture, region, and everything else). If you have lived on $45,000 a year as a single parent, as I have, you know that that amount is at the edge of a dangerous precipice. And if you don’t have health insurance but have to pay medical bills, you’re quite possible living in poverty despite your paycheck. That, to me, indicates that $45,000 can be, depending on your situation, a working class income.

A 2004 study by the Drum Institute for Public Policy put the middle class as $40,000 and $95,000, even as people all over the income map also argued to be put in this category. But the Federal poverty guidelines for 2009 are $22,050 for a family of 4. As anybody who’s been poor knows, you can qualify for some help like the nutrition program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) and Aid for Families with Dependent Children if you are above that low, low level of poverty. If you have a household of 4, you can be classified as “needy” by the federal government and qualify for WIC if you make up to 185 percent of the federal poverty level, or $40,793.

Therefore, your income at $40,793 makes you needy. But by $40,000 you should be middle class. The ability to work and support yourself—to be working class and survive without aid from the government or without some seriously scary situations and the risk of bankruptcy and all those other looming catastrophes that come with being poor—has thus completely disappeared.

Here’s an impurity test: Is your job highly automated and controlled by people seventeen steps above you in a massive bureaucracy over which you have no control? Do you have crappy health insurance in which you pay over $3,000 a year out-of-pocket for deductibles? Are you working a job where health insurance is offered in a scam that makes it completely unattainable or where it is not offered at all? Do you make under $75,000 a year? Do you care for and live with one or more non-wage-earners (children, elderly parents, etc.)? Are you self-employed but netting less than $40,000 per year? Or do you pay employees but take home less than $40,000 per year? Are you currently receiving calls from a collections agency? Do you have a high school education or less? Do you have a college education or greater but so many loans that the debt you owe is astronomical? Did one or more of your parents not go to college? Are you a single parent? You might be working class. That is not to say that making this income in the United States isn’t a huge privilege compared with the economic situation of workers in the rest of the world, but we have to start by understanding and defining the way we actually live here. And here, we pay for much of our social services out of pocket. Our income isn’t what it seems to be.

A recent series of graphics in Mother Jones separates income categories into those who make over $27 million a year, those who make over $3 million, over $1 million, over $165,000… and then everyone else. The bottom 90% makes on average $31,000 a year. Maybe that is who should be called middle class. And if we did that, maybe things in our society would suddenly get a lot clearer.

Consumer goods are not a measure of class status, though the companies who sell cars and air freshener have an obvious interest in making us believe that their products will create the comfortable and safe, imaginary lives of people in their commercials. Companies tap into the bottomless longing for security and tie their bottom line to our experience of insecurity. And from a consumer angle, it’s easy to fake middle class by hitting good sales, being good at garage sales and thrift store visits, and racking up credit card debt. But this doesn’t mean everyone is brainwashed or middle class because they look like the television commercial version of middle class. We need to get beyond trashing people for buying into this culture in large and small ways. We’re soaking in consumerism, and building resistance to that takes time. Just because someone aspires to take a cruise—or can take one—does not make them middle class. We need to be less harsh on the people around us who are trying to find some joy in their lives.

Working people feel oppressed—they have to pay taxes, they get sub-par social services, and their lives are stressful and uncertain because the government and corporate American are always messing with their schools and ability to get loans and healthcare; it’s one attack after another, and that can make a person cranky. But because working people often don’t have any vocabulary to describe their experience, so it turns to envy (must be those damn unionized workers keeping me down) or racism (which obviously never turns out well.) I’m not condoning all the confusion in the attacks on public sector unions; I’m just advocating that we understand how complex working-class life can be, especially when there’s no clear alternative and no term for describing reality. Just because someone buys the ruling class rhetoric doesn’t mean that they have become middle class. Not all Tea Partiers are middle class. Not all academics and lefties are middle class. And then we need to imagine a world where someone can buy a bookshelf at IKEA and be working class and call themselves by their true name.

I like reading about artists in other mediums who talk about the nuts and bolts of their careers, because it often shines a more direct light on the writing life than a writer writing about writing. Why? I’m not sure.

I think I received this link on Twitter, a blog post about musician John Mayer’s visit to Berklee School of Music entitled “Manage the Temptation to Publish Yourself.”

Mayer talks about the opportunity presented by the internet to promote one’s self. He found use of social media sapping his songwriting time and most importantly his focus. He advised students to focus on their work, which makes sense, especially when one is getting familiar with his or her own craft. But even for people later in their careers, it can be tough to balance promotion and creation.

Promotion is only useful if you have something to promote, Mayer says: “You got the distraction of being able to publish yourself immediately, and it is a distraction if you’re not done producing what the product is going to be that you’re going to someday use the promotion to sell…I had to go through the same thing I’m talking to you about – what you have to go through – which is to completely manage all the distraction. Manage the temptation of publishing yourself.”

This, I realize, is different than the common understanding that we as people are also individual brands we have to push on the world. But even though I couldn’t identify more than one Jonathan Mayer song if I heard it, I like the old-school practicality of his point. Promote when you’ve got something really good to share. And first you have to work on something really good.

He second point is equally practical, speaking to the seduction of small ego boosts that come from instant affirmation to one’s post. He shared how he found himself crafting tweets and posts to garner

“joy in little, tiny statements – little, tiny applause hits.”

What’s important for me here is that he again keeps it practical. Joy is not bad, so if the internet is run with a constant surf of tiny applause hits, all the better for the joy. Twitter is not bad, Facebook is not the devil. But for the writer or the artist or musician, I think he’s saying that the pull of those immediate hits draws you from a longer process, in which you should be alone with your work, working and working, and then listening for what in you responds to your own work and sounds like your own applause. Because our egos are almost always involved and respond to praise, it makes sense to protect the space for that creation.

Other nice points to dispel the cobwebs of fear, envy, and self-doubt:

“ It’s not about getting your foot in the door or meeting a person and them giving you an opportunity. Doesn’t exist. Does. Not. Exist. Nobody is going to sign you at a record company anymore – they’re not in the business of building an artist from scratch anymore. You got to bring them what you already have. “

The fantasy of a “lucky break,” he said, is “dismissive of what you can actually do. It’s dismissive of your actual talent.” Equally fallacious is the idea of art as a competition in which your success must equal the failure of others:

“If you’re good, and you know you’re good, and you know you’re better than those people getting paid to do it, you still have to have an open ear….Nobody’s music is the enemy of your music…The idea that someone else has made it when they shouldn’t have made it is toxic thinking.”

“This is when you see somebody who’s frighteningly good and you stay and watch them until the moment you can rationalize with yourself that actually they’re not.”… “your limitations will define you in the best way. Your limitations make you who you are.”

Janet Maslin of the New York Times recently wrote that Tina Fey’s hilarious Bossypants as “isn’t a memoir.” I’ll delay my answer to that the question for a bit while I say, first, that the book definitely qualifies as a smart work of nonfiction by a person about that real person’s life. Tina Fey is a real live writer, and it shows throughout this wickedly hilarious work. She tells the story of my small subsection of American culture (short dark-haired ethnic-looking white girls), and she observes popular culture, dishes on behind-the-scenes at Saturday Night Live.

Most importantly, she presents herself as a REAL human being working to catch herself in contradictions. That’s a big part of the job of comedians, after all. She tells about crying at work, about growing up with a series of bad haircuts and bad fashion choices, about her family and what it’s like being a woman in charge. Every sentence in the book is smart and funny. (I was reading it one night after putting my son to bed, and I laughed so loud I woke him up. Sorry, bud.)

So is the fact that this book is by a well-known person grounds for excluding it from the ranks of “literature”? Nope. Should we ignore it as a celebrity bio because it’s written by someone on television? Nope. In fact, I can’t think of a reason why I should keep it off my recommended reading list of model book-length creative nonfiction works for my students.

Here are five reasons why:

1. Fey does humor well, and humor–especially mixed with serious insights–is hard.

2. Fey does scene, character sketches, and sensory detail with the best of them.

3. Fey does voice, with a self-deprecating awareness that creates the double-vision I tell my students to cultivate.

4. Fey takes on the hypothetical and imagined reality that is often shocking to the publishing world but natural to anyone with a brain. In other words, she makes a joke about life in a hypothetical “So-I-said-to-myself” tone while acknowledging that this is all going on in her head. She laughs about this as “joke reality,” that it doesn’t need explaining in the land of comedy, but sometimes does in the context of memoirs evaluated on their truthiness.

5. Fey does not do sappy-sweet insights. She pitches against every feel-good narrative and digs deeper into her own character and foibles to find the hilarious complexity.

So… I can’t see why Bossypants is not memoir. It’s the kind of memoir we should aim to write.

Heidi Cullen’s recent book, The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet seems like it should be required reading for anyone living in this era of global warming (and that would be all of us). I found that it pushed me past my own apocalyptic denial; Cullen writes with such care and authority about the ways global warming would and is already affecting specific places around the globe. She weaves in elements of her own research career, profiles the personalities of the key scientists in the field that might be called “coping with reality.” The book is chock-full of scientific explanations yet eminently readable.

And, for the craft nerd commercial, something cool to think about in the land of literary nonfiction: at the end of every chapter, Cullen presents imagined scenarios of what might happen in specific regions in the future. The cue to the reader is simple: a date that hasn’t happened yet. And this is 1) clear to any reader who’s paying attention and 2) eminently helpful. What she does is take the dire and abstract predictions of science and make them REAL and also more specific and human by imagining one scenario of how global warming might affect people, geography, the environment, and the weather. This is a lovely example of genre-bending as well as a clear use of fiction, clearly demarcated, within nonfiction, for the purposes of reader edification.

The takeaway: imagination is NOT anathema in the field of literary nonfiction. In fact, I think it’s a no-brainer for good nonfiction. All you have to do is communicate to the reader that you’re stepping into the land of “let’s imagine.”

Just finished Sebastian Junger’s War, an excellent first-person account of being embedded with soldiers in Afghanistan. It wasn’t what I expected–but if a book doesn’t defy expectations, it might not be an interesting book.

“Journalistic convention holds that you can’t write objectively about people you’re close to, but you can’t write objectively about people who are shooting at you either. Pure objectivity–difficult enough while covering a city council meeting–isn’t remotely possible in a war….Objectivity and honest are not the same thing, though, and it is entirely possible to write with honesty about the very personal and distorting experiences of war.”

Hello all- I was very happy to be able to answer the very insightful questions posed by the fantastic writer Mary Akers, editor of the online journal r.k.vr.y, on such topics as life-changing moments of realization and my ideas of recovery and its influence. You can find them at “Interview with Sonya Huber.” Thank you, Mary and r.k.vr.y, for running such a great journal!