Hand to Mouth

Hand To Mouth is the famous book by Linda Tirado, a longer version of her poverty thoughts essay, where she explains how junk food, cigarettes, and lack of long-term financial planning aren’t the cause of poverty, but symptoms of it.

A lot of this book is an explanation, directed at faceless others who believe that people in poverty just need to learn about budgeting better. Some of the scenes in this book are a little too Dickensian, and I couldn’t help feeling there must be more that was strategically left out, but the crux of the book, about being ground down by a series of part-time, seasonal, unstable jobs, with awful commutes  and no benefits is real. Part-time jobs that expect 40 hours (or more) of availability for 25 hours of paid work are common. Temp jobs or contract work is common, with layoffs at the end of the project or the busy season. And then there’s a thinkpiece about job-hopping millennials and their sad lack of company loyalty — oh wait, that’s not part of this book.

I’m usually frustrated with financial advice about how anyone can save money by cutting out Starbucks and manicures. About 10 years ago, my mom gave me a Suze Orman book that suggested cutting back to basic cable to save an easy $40 a month. At the time, I had no TV and no cable bill. (I mean, I still have no TV and no cable, but that’s not unusual any more.) It’s financial advice for a different class, in a different time — it’s just not practical for my life. Most grocery shopping advice doesn’t work for me, either. I don’t have a car, so I can only buy what I can carry home, which is fine, because I live in a small apartment without a pantry or a big freezer to store a massive BOGO bounty. I don’t mean that I’m struggling, I live the same life that most young, working people in my city live. I just don’t think that the usual financial advice is meaningful anymore.  Simply put, people are not poor because they need a middle-class reformer to tell them that sales and coupons exist.

A lot of Hand to Mouth is well-written, clear articulation of policies that screw employees and of the ridiculousness of customer service jobs, mixed in with personal experiences to highlight these wider trends. She points out the persistent stereotypes that penalize job-seekers for not appearing middle-class enough for white-collar jobs, and aid-seekers for not appearing desperate enough for food aid.  There’s a lot of good content here. The book could have been three or four really hard-hitting essays, but instead it’s meandering and even repetitive at times. The final chapter is a listicle rant aimed at amorphous “rich people,” basically personified Fox News, which felt like unedited padding to hit word count.

Most of the negative feedback I’ve seen about this book is about how angry Tirado is. Women aren’t supposed to be angry, even when women are proportionately angry over legitimate concerns, it’s described as strident and hysterical. But I think I’m done with the politely-asking stage of my life, and I think this is a reasonable, proportionate anger.

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