Bootstrapper: From Broke to Badass on a Northern Michigan Farm

By Mardi Jo Link

Poignant, irreverent, and hilarious: a memoir about survival and self-discovery, by an indomitable woman who never loses sight of what matters most. 

It’s the summer of 2005, and Mardi Jo Link’s dream of living the simple life has unraveled into debt, heartbreak, and perpetually ragged cuticles. She and her husband of nineteen years have just called it quits, leaving her with serious cash-flow problems and a looming divorce. More broke than ever, Link makes a seemingly impossible resolution: to hang on to her century-old farmhouse in northern Michigan and continue to raise her three boys on well water and wood chopping and dirt. Armed with an unfailing sense of humor and three resolute accomplices, Link confronts blizzards and foxes, learns about Zen divorce and the best way to butcher a hog, dominates a zucchini-growing contest and wins a year’s supply of local bread, masters the art of bargain cooking, wrangles rampaging poultry, and withstands any blow to her pride in order to preserve the life she wants.

With an infectious optimism that would put Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm to shame and a deep appreciation of the natural world, Link tells the story of how, over the course of one long year, she holds on to her sons, saves the farm from foreclosure, and finds her way back to a life of richness and meaning on the land she loves. 

This ebook edition includes a Reading Group Guide. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Jun 11, 2013
• ISBN: 9780385349673

Reviews for Bootstrapper

[avasnana1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This woman writes as well as Cheryl Stayed without ever leaving home.If you are looking for a book to inspire you to move on with your life after a bad relationship, this is also a great choice. Ms. Link's opening scene concerning the ritual burning of her wedding dress was inspiring.

[libraryhead · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Started strong but didn't pay off. Fully agree with Ella_Jill below. Very little homesteading inspo. Almost nothing on her journey to badassery, other than she became broke (due largely to her own choices and some bad luck) and over time became less so.

[jennybeast · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Good writer, and a well told memoir of a hard period in her life. A reminder that poverty is always much closer than we think, and what that looks like from the inside. Vaguely annoying, in that I wanted her to succeed without the new love of my life marriage thing, but a good read for all of that.

[mjspear_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Mardi Jo Link is divorced, broke, cold, and hungry. She's trying to hang on to her three sons, her horses, her house, and her land. What sounds like a tragedy, plays out as a surprisingly uplifting tale of surviving -- thriving -- in Northern Michigan.Told in vignettes loosely follow a calendar year the author includes many details of living and working on a small-time farm...for this reader, the most interesting parts of the book. Others will relate to her trials facing a divorce and raising three sons to be good citizens.

[pferdina · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A woman with three sons is getting divorced from their father after almost 20 years. All she has is the farmhouse and the land in northern Michigan. This is the true story of how she fed and clothed everyone for the first year, by growing vegetables and being resourceful. I admire her strength, her ability to get things done when there didn't seem to be a solution in sight. She didn't make the best choices every time, but no one does. I was disappointed that she couldn't handle the chickens when it came time.

[hemlokgang · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book, the autobiographical story of a single mother with a dream, started a little slow, but became increasingly engaging. The author conveyed the sense of desperation she felt at times, the feelings of shame and degradation which she combatted with the pride of independence and survival, and the love of her three boys very well. It is not a unique story, yet a story well told.

[twink_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Bootstrapper: to promote or develop by initiative and effort with little or no assistance --- Merriam-Webster dictionary. Mardi Jo Link is living the life she always dreamed of - three amazing young sons and the opportunity to raise them in the countryside in a beautiful old farmhouse sitting on six acres. And yes, there was a husband too - but with divorce now a certainty, Mardi Jo is determined to hang onto her sons, her house and her land - by herself. "I'm claiming my sons, the farm, the debt, the other debt, the horses, the dogs, and the land. I'm claiming our century-old farmhouse, the garden, the woods, the pasture, the barn, and the Quonset-hut garage. They're all mine now, and this is how I will raise my boys: on cheerful summer days and well water and BB guns and horseback riding and dirt. Because I'm claiming our whole country life, the one I've been dreaming of and planning out and working for since I was a little girl."And this is where the bootstrapping comes into play -for Link is working with next to nothing in the way of finances. And wants to do it on her own - "I made this bed and I'll either lie in it or die in it, but I won't ask anyone for help."Mardi Jo details the physical ups and downs - the day to day business of providing, but Bootstrapper also reads like a personal diary with Link's hopes, dreams, triumphs, losses and more laid bare. But what shone through the brightest was the love for her sons. These are the passages that stayed with me the longest. There are struggles, but the love and support they feel for each other is tangible. And quite humorous at times.""Boys," I announced, "we're going to raise some chickens.""Another pet to play with!" said Will, the idealist."Another kind of poop to clean up, said Luke, the worker."Another animal in bondage," said Owen, the activist."I couldn't put Bootstrapper down - I was cheering Mardi Jo on with every chapter. And I empathized - we too bought an old farmhouse and there were some mighty lean years in the beginning - and there were two of us. I loved the descriptions of her garden - I too have grown our own vegetables for many, many years. Seed catalogues are exciting. And at the end of the year is there a happy ever after ending? I'll let you discover that for yourself. Bootstrapper is a one sitting read, one I enjoyed for its honesty. These are the memoirs I like to read - real people, real life. And she sounds like the kind of person I'd like to visit with on the porch.

[satyridae · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I got this book free at ALA Midwinter.

I'm from Ohio (thisclose to Michigan) and Link's voice sounded so familiar to me that I was immediately drawn in to her memoir of divorce and reinvention. I could identify deeply with much of it. Being a single mom is hard. Being a poor single mom with no steady income is harder still. Link makes her story sing. One roots for her and the boys the whole way through. There are hilarious bits, and others that like to tore out my heart. Over the course of this short book (I read it in one sitting) I grew to know and care deeply about her whole family. Recommended.

[samsattler · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Bootstrapper, Mardi Jo Link’s new memoir, threw me a bit of a curve. The book’s subtitle reads this way: From Broke to Badass on a Northern Michigan Farm, leading me to believe that its focus was on the difficulty of eking out a living from one of today’s small American farms – a topic that intrigues me, especially as seen from the female point-of-view. Instead, Bootstrapper is more the story of one woman’s struggle to survive the breakup of her marriage to a Weak Ass from Northern Michigan – a much more common and less intriguing topic.Link’s husband, when the couple first split up, moved only a few hundred feet away from the mortgaged acreage and family home in which Mardi Jo continued to live with her three sons. This made it easy for Mardi Jo and her soon-to-be ex-husband to hand the boys off so that they could spend time with each parent. But Mr. Ex, for the most part, was surprisingly invisible even as, just across the road from his new place, it should have been obvious that Mardi Jo and her boys were struggling to put food on the table. Mardi Jo, though, saw life on the family farm as “living the dream” and refused to give it up even when she and the boys were largely living on peanut butter and the free bakery goods they won in a zucchini-growing contest. She had one huge problem: she really knew very little about growing her own food, raising the meat that would sustain her family over the long Michigan winter, or keeping the chickens that would supply the family with fresh eggs. Eventually, she learned these things, but she learned them the hard way.The best thing about Bootstrapper is meeting Mardi Jo’s three sons, each of whom seems to have a unique personality and a different set of life-skills that combine perfectly to help their mother keep things together just long enough for the family to survive their near-disastrous first year of single-parenthood. Mardi Jo, determined to save her farm despite the numerous sacrifices this will require from her and her children, is lucky to have these boys.Bottom Line: Bootstrapper is an interesting memoir about a woman who, despite the tremendous odds stacked against her, refuses to give up her dream of living on the family farm. Regardless of its subtitle, however, this is a book about a writer who happens to live on a farm; it is not a book about small-time farming in the twenty-first century.