Stephanie Land's MAID (2019), a gift from my daughter, was, I've learned, a monster bestseller five years ago, now translated into several languages, and soon to be a Netflix film. I guess I missed all that hoopla somehow, but I'm very happy for the author, because the book itself, a memoir, is one of the saddest damn stories I've read in a long time. It chronicles her hardscrabble years of extreme poverty and barely scraping by as a single mom who cleaned houses for a living and lived in a tiny, mold-infested studio apartment with her toddler daughter, who was often sick from their substandard living conditions. There is much here too about the red tape of welfare and government programs for the poor - and it's not very flattering - as well as the less than sympathetic attitudes of people who are better off. Land is an excellent writer and never gives in to mawkish self-pity, but instead just tells it like it was, including how she sometimes had to just weep at the hopelessness of her situation. I winced my way through the whole thing, hoping against hope that things would improve for her. Did they? Read the book. It's a good one. Very highly recommended.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER ( )

Stephanie Land is a powerful author with a story worth sharing. Detailing her difficulty overcoming poverty to raise her child, Maid exemplifies just how hard it is to survive as a poor person in America today. The adversity Land faces can be difficult to read at times, but you find yourself rooting for her from page one forward. ( )

I am not quite sure why I should feel so guilty about not liking this book - probably it is middle class, liberal guilt at not feeling sorry for a woman who is scraping by with not a lot and who is also a single mother. But there are several things that really irritated me.

The first time I was irritated was when I discovered that she was 28 years old when she became pregnant. How had she managed not to be pregnant in all the previous years? Why did it happen then? Why wasn't she being extra careful because the man was abusive? She might have given us some background around the situation to help us understand. It felt a little like she was hiding something.

The second element was that she hated it when people were judgemental about her, quite rightly. Poverty does not equal laziness or lack of ability, all it means is a lack of money and often no resources to fall back on. Nothing else. But then she goes on to judge other people, her parents included for not caring about her, not ringing on her birthday, her mother being more overweight than ever, her clients and their habits. It is right to be judgmental about the benefits system and child credit and how hard it is made to obtain them and she does briefly explore this but not in any depth. I know Land was writing her story but in truth, her story became a little boring.

I was unclear about what Land wanted from society if it isn't what she was getting. How do we help people in poverty find a way to live their lives with stability and resources? I am imagining that education is her way out even though she has to go into debt to achieve it. Decent, affordable housing for people on benefits would be another route; housing where a child can play and parents do not need to worry about their child's health. Child care, I presume, although she was accessing support with that.

I was irritated by her decision making: to stop on a motorway (or an American equivalent) for a toy. We all know how dangerous that is. I also knew as soon as she mentioned that she had a car that it would break down in some way and put her in more jeopardy - this was a tad predictable. Moving in with a man she had known after four months who turned up for a date in his work clothes. Come on! It was doomed to fail. Allowing an abusive man access to his daughter at weekends and holidays. Really? She comments regularly that she can hear men in the background when she rings her daughter when she stays with her father and she doesn't know who they are, alerting us to the fact that her daughter could be in danger but she doesn't put a stop to it.

The saddest thing about this book is that I think it is an intergenerational problem that is never explored. Her father has no money. In fact when he comes to pick her up after her car accident, he has no money to buy fuel - he does however, turn up to get her. Her mother now lives in Europe and seems to be living with at the very least a controlling man who does not want Land in his life. Her father is abusive towards the woman he was living with so there are many things that are being repeated here.

Land also drops into the book that she looks different to everyone else and that she is heavily tattooed. Now I don't want to stereotype here about why women might do this, but she never explains why. I was left overall with the feeling that there was much more to this story than was told and although I am very interested in how people 'level up' to use the government's parlance, I can't bring myself to read her next book. This book made me want to rant! ( )

I wanted to love this memoir. I wanted to be able to say, as I did for Tara Westover’s superb “Educated,” that every American should read this, but I can’t say that with conviction. Clearly, Stephanie Hand and her daughter endured hardships most of us will be fortunate enough to avoid in our lives. The sad truth that there are hard-working people who need government assistance just to scrape by in challenging living conditions is well documented in this personal story. There is great value in Ms. Land’s exposing the indignities she endured after escaping an abusive relationship with her daughter’s father and finding themselves homeless, with family unable to provide financial or emotional support, applying for assistance, working difficult labor cleaning other people’s filth and poor hygiene, getting lectured by people in the supermarket when she used her WIC or SNAP benefits to feed her daughter . . . . But, I also grew tired of her complaints, some of the things she did while cleaning houses, her dissatisfaction with her employers, clients, landlords, doctors, other mothers who had more than she did, every man she became involved with. Certainly, the public safety net is a difficult and often demeaning system to navigate, and many people have no sympathy at all for people who must avail themselves of social service to simply survive, but her lamentations grew wearisome. There were many wonderful moments, her fierce love for her daughter was admirable and sustained her through dark times, and I certainly rooted for her to eventually realize her dream of finishing her college degree, but I could have done with less anger and complaining. I read so many glowing reviews; perhaps my expectations were too high. ( )

If like me you came to Stephanie Land’s stirring account of her years as a single mom raising her daughter while cleaning homes from the Netflix TV series, be prepared.

The TV series diverges from the book. A lot.

So much so that it got me to wondering if the screenwriters went off on a few tangents to make the story more dramatic or if in talking to Stephanie, they came up with a different view of what actually happened.

After seeing both the TV series and reading the book we are in full agreement with the premise that poor people in America get the cold shoulder from other segments of society.

And I can see how the bureaucracy dispensing welfare services, the courts mediating family breakups, and weak state labour and housing laws appear to conspire to make it hard for anyone trying to raise themselves out of poverty in America.

I am also in full agreement that cleaning homes is not the most pleasant way to earn a living for even a healthy young person, but the book suggests that Stephanie isn’t that young or that healthy when the story opens.

(If I sound a little blasé about this it’s probably because I just finished reading a book about late 17th century London where the chamber pots were routinely emptied in the basement of the London home. It was a time before indoor plumbing, electrified indoor lighting, water heaters, and central heating. Maids in those days were given the worst drudgery known to modern life for the worst pay.)

Stephanie’s mom in the TV series seems to have been hugely expanded to give Andy McDowell a bigger role. Possibly they needed her star power to draw Netflix financing.

But in the book, it is Stephanie’s grandmother who suffered from mental illness, not her mother. And her grandmother is deceased before the book opens. In the book, Stephanie’s mother apparently lives in France with her boyfriend and is well removed from the action.

The movie and the book make it seem that Stephanie’s literary aspirations were there all along, but neither point out that she just has her daughter at the end of her 20’s. Why she didn’t apply to college a lot earlier is a bit of a mystery to me after reading the book. Where did her 20’s go?

Stephanie’s social life is vaguely alluded to in the book. In the book she saw Jamie, encouraged him, and he invited her for a drink. That supposedly spawned the wild romance. In the book he is a pastry chef. In the movie he is a bartender.

Supposedly, in the book, the romance was cemented when she saw literary classics on his bookshelves. She just happened to get pregnant from him, not earlier? We are led to believe it was accidental and Stephanie appears shocked that Jamie didn’t want a family with her.

The real Stephanie has tatoos up the wazoo. A) They aren’t cheap and B) they hurt. She must have used her landscaping earnings for those.

Much is made in the book of Stephanie’s loneliness as a single mother, but she clearly met Jamie while she was partying with her friends, so we know she had friends. Did they all disappear when she had the baby?

And where did Stephanie live before she fell in love with Jamie? It seems Stephanie became estranged from her family long before the story opened, so she must have lived somewhere.

The book, even more than the TV series, makes it sound as though Stephanie not only didn’t have friends from before her relationship with Jamie, but found it completely impossible to make friends during her cleaning career.

The TV series makes it look like Stephanie didn’t get any education until after she moves to Misoula, but the book says she got loans and took classes at the local college, or possibly by correspondence

Harsh weather is nothing new to Stephanie — she grew up in the northwest and Alaska; but in the book she seems genuinely surprised by a snowstorm. I live in Canada where it is almost impossible to survive with no friends or family or capital in this climate.

In the book, never does Stephanie put 2 and 2 together about the studio. She comes in and the landlords are repainting the place. Not long after she moves in the black mold appears. Clearly, the landlords were trying to cover up the mold. That’s why they weren’t pushy about collecting the last month’s rent.

Stephanie waits until her daughter is very sick to move out and makes it seem that she couldn’t move again both because there were few landlords who would take her government cheques and because she couldn’t afford the time off.

TV series redraws the loss of the apt above the garage, quite a seminal moment in the movie, not so much in the book.

At the same time I was reading this book I was listening to an audiobook version of Andre Agassi’s fascinating memoir, “Open.” Agassi’s youth was marred by a devotion of his father to the idea that Andre was destined to become a pro tennis player. One of the low points in the story is when Pere sends 13-year-old Andre to a tennis camp in Florida, thousands of miles from his Las Vegas home. And to a terrible private academy.

At the end of his tennis career, a much wealthier Agassi pledges to build a charter school for underprivileged African American youth in his hometown. Agassi is shocked at how little the state of Nevada financed public education.

There are parallels with Stephanie Land’s story.

Part of America no longer seems willing to consider social and economic problems endemic to their system, possibly to any organization of society. People seem to think any individual can solve their own problems, that communities shouldn’t take on these problems collectively.

Perhaps it’s the myth of the American dream that holds them back.

At the same time, if you speak to entrepreneurs you will here them talk about the value in scale, at tackling business challenges at scale. That, they often say, is where the real money is to be made.

The same people people who believe in operating capitalism at scale decry the work of government to address social and economic problems at scale. ( )