Alissa Quart's new book
Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America sports a cover blurb by Barbara Ehrenreich, whose 2001 book
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America became a bestseller by reporting on the deepening financial crisis facing the American middle class. People born in the year Ehrenreich's book came out have grown up in the darkening world her book describes, and
Squeezed can easily be seen as a follow-up, a front-lines report on that darkening world.
Quart opens with the story of her own pregnancy, which happened after she and her husband had for years been enjoying the modest professional freedoms of "doing what they want" and which came as a series of eye-opening financial shocks. She quickly realizes that they are in no position to absorb the sheer costs of having a child; before she and her husband find more secure and better-paying jobs, they had been members of what Quart terms "the Middle Precariat,"
highly educated people whose labor has become irregular and contingent, often entailing a good deal of unpaid "shadow work," and all only barely sufficient to keep up the facade of middle class respectability. "These people believed that their training or background would ensure that they would be properly, comfortably middle-class," she writes, "but it has not worked out that way."
In a series of in-depth and deeply personal interviews, Quart delves into the lives of some of these people - an adjunct professor who must use food stamps to feed herself and her daughter, despite working constantly, harried caregivers who work so much they barely see their own children, and half a dozen others caught in the endless cycle of "running just to stay in place."
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