I was never comfortable with Barbara Ehrenreich's book Nickel and Dimed, in which a wealthy white woman is airlifted into poor parts of America and tries to make a living on minimum wage. It felt, to me, like an ill-considered anthropological study. The book had the smack of condescension to it, and as someone who was working for not very much more than minimum wage as a bookseller when she published it, I resented the heroic reception Ehrenreich received for the book from the NPR crowd. If the publishing industry really wanted to know how it felt to be a poor person in America today, why didn't they fucking ask a poor person to write a fucking book about it?

It took a decade and a half, but that finally happened. Linda Tirado's Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America is a harrowing first-person account of what it's like to work for nothing. (For those of you who are still Nickel and Dimed fans, Hand features a foreword by Ehrenreich, giving her the Patron Saint of Poor Folk seal of approval.) It's important to note up front that Tirado has been under fire for not being 'authentically' poor enough. Tirado addresses these charges in the book, and really those debunkings misunderstand the importance of Hand. Yes, Tirado attended a boarding school for a while as a kid, on a scholarship. And yes, she has had other opportunities. But that's not a sign of inauthenticity: Most of the lower middle class is just a couple paychecks away from ruination. Her account of her years of living poor has none of the glitz and glamour of Ehrenreich's timed experiment. If Tirado had a safety net during that time, she keeps it concealed from the reader, and her bank account isn't the point here in any case. This is not a book full of easily disproved anecdotes about her life as a poor woman, it's a passionate defense of the lower class. Any "revelations" from a right wing hungry to debunk the existence of poor people miss the important argument the book makes.

Tirado explains the vocabulary of money in an introduction:

Poverty is when a quarter is a fucking miracle. Poor is when a dollar is a miracle. Broke is when five bucks is a miracle. Working class is being broke, but doing so in a place that might not be run-down. Middle class is being able to own some toys and to live in a nice place—and by "nice," I don't mean fancy; I mean that you can afford to buy your own furniture and not lease it and that while you still worry about bills, you aren't constantly worried about homelessness. And rich is anything above that.

Hand is a series of passionate essays about being poor in America. Many of them are aimed directly at rich people, explaining that poor people are human beings who deserve to have dignity. (It's heartbreaking to read Tirado patiently explaining that poor people should be allowed to have children, but a quick search of pretty much any political comment thread will prove that there are a lot of internet warriors out there who seem to be in favor of sterilizing the lower classes.) Most of them explain the various catch 22s of life as a poor person—to get a job, you need nice clothes and a car that you can't afford in the first place; when you work retail, you need to be simultaneously available to customers at all times and working out back off the sales floor; if you can't afford medical care for your health problems, your health gets worse and requires more care until you wind up in the middle of an emergency room visit you can't afford.

In a world where poor people in political settings must preface their statements by pointing out they're not one of those poor people, this book is a bracing defense of all poor people. The most valuable asset Hand has going for it is Tirado's anger. She swears frequently. She sounds exasperated half the time. Without Ehrenreich's distancing magnifying glass in front of her face, Tirado trades in a very realistic outrage. It's a vigorous defense of Americans who increasingly have no voices left in the media, which makes this an incredibly valuable book.