A review by msteinfeld
Class: A Memoir of Motherhood, Hunger, and Higher Education by Stephanie Land

3.5 Stars. This second memoir bridges the gap between the two voices in Maid: that of the young, struggling mother working as a maid, and the author herself years later. It focuses on her life and struggles while Land finished her BA in Montana. I found this valuable as a prompt to question all the structural and societal biases that require people to "perform" poverty in the right way in order to qualify for benefits or even just sympathy, and I really like Land's writing style. However, this felt more chronological narrative than memoir than Maid, and I wanted a little more depth. In this installment, there is a much stronger feel of a support network in the background - friends who take her daughter camping, or who she hikes with, or who provide babysitting - but they mostly stay in the shadows, and I'd like see more of those relationships; there is a little dissonance in her dissatisfaction with the reliability of her friends/network and all the small ways they show up in these background roles, and I think there is more there that would be very interesting to explore.