The Privilege to Feel: Essays on Resilience and Other Myths

From Stephanie Land, critically acclaimed author of bestselling memoirs Maid and Class, a series of autobiographical essays based on the bureaucratic forms that shaped her life. An exploration of the trauma of poverty and finding hope in the face of an American system increasingly devoid of compassion. People struggling to make ends meet are governed by forms that request information in flat, declarative language. Vehicle make and model. Previous hospitalizations. They have no space for what the answers actually hold. Asking if the applicant is pregnant doesn't ask how many times they've tried or how scared they are to hope. The reasons for the hospitalizations. The night a teenager's first car was totaled. The years it took to recover from each of them. In her third book, Stephanie Land offers a collection of essays, using those emotionless, bureaucratic prompts to tell the stories behind them. Written from the other side of recognition and a public reckoning with poverty, these essays move through a high school car accident and its decades-long aftermath: a hospitalization for a diagnosis left untreated, and insurmountable medical bills that resulted in bankruptcy.