Published in 2019, Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive is a memoir by Stephanie Land which documents her economic difficulties in trying to stake out a decent lifestyle for herself during her twenties. Somewhat surprisingly—even shockingly—the book debuted in the number three slot on the New York Times bestseller list. This is an achievement that many writers who have been successfully writing books for decades cannot even claim and yet the almost completely unknown Land somehow managed to pull it off with a first book that is hardly the runaway feelgood story of the decade.
The tome started out a series of essays published on the Vox website which was then reformulated into a more thematically cohesive reckoning of the state of the economy for young adults just before the age of Covid changed everything. The unexpected and almost completely unprecedented commercial success of the book was certainly helped along by some rather high-profile fans and critical acclaim. Barack Obama included Land’s book on his summer reading list for 2019. Members of the Goodreads website site picked it as a finalist for the best memoir of the year. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post included it on their respective lists of the 100 and the 50 most notable books of 2019. And it wound up becoming one of Amazon’s top sellers of the year in the process.
As if all that success weren’t enough to take away much of the pain outlined in the narrative, the book was adapted into a ten-episode series airing on Netflix in 2021 where it managed to break the record for most viewers in a single month set by the wildly successful The Queen’s Gambit.
While Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive has received something approaching universal acclaim among the biggest name reviewers, some reader reviews have not been quite as glowing. Among the most notably recurring negative points made about Land’s story is that she often seems quite willing to turn down certain types of menial jobs while at the same time praising her own work ethic as well as pointing out some questionable spending decision amid claims of barely managing to get by even with the financial assistance of friends, family and government programs.
Nevertheless, the broader acclaim garnered by the book resulted in a deal for a follow-up to be published in 2022. Titled Class, the focus of that volume will also relate heavily to the cost of making a decent living in 21st century American economics.
