Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America

By Linda Tirado

One of the Best 5 Books of 2014 — Esquire

"I’ve been waiting for this book for a long time. Well, not this book, because I never imagined that the book I was waiting for would be so devastatingly smart and funny, so consistently entertaining and unflinchingly on target. In fact, I would like to have written it myself – if, that is, I had lived Linda Tirado’s life and extracted all the hard lessons she has learned. I am the author of Nickel and Dimed, which tells the story of my own brief attempt, as a semi-undercover journalist, to survive on low-wage retail and service jobs. Tirado is the real thing."
—from the foreword by Barbara Ehrenreich, New York Times bestselling author of Nickel and Dimed

We in America have certain ideas of what it means to be poor. Linda Tirado, in her signature brutally honest yet personable voice, takes all of these preconceived notions and smashes them to bits. She articulates not only what it is to be working poor in America (yes, you can be poor and live in a house and have a job, even two), but what poverty is truly like—on all levels. 

Frankly and boldly, Tirado discusses openly how she went from lower-middle class, to sometimes middle class, to poor and everything in between, and in doing so reveals why “poor people don’t always behave the way middle-class America thinks they should.” 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
• Release date: Oct 2, 2014
• ISBN: 9780698175280

Linda Tirado

Linda Tirado is a completely average American with two kids and, until recently, two jobs. Her essay “Why I Make Terrible Decisions, or, Poverty Thoughts,” was picked up by The Huffington Post, The Nation, and countless other publications, and was read by more than six million people. Hand to Mouth is her first book.

Book preview

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Copyright © 2014 by Linda Tirado

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ISBN 978-0-698-17528-0

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Version_1

For Tom, who can’t say I didn’t warn him

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Foreword by Barbara Ehrenreich

Introduction

1 It Takes Money to Make Money

2 You Get What You Pay For

3 You Can’t Pay a Doctor in Chickens Anymore

4 I’m Not Angry So Much as I’m Really Tired

5 I’ve Got Way Bigger Problems Than a Spinach Salad Can Solve

6 This Part Is About Sex

7 We Do Not Have Babies for Welfare Money

8 Poverty Is Fucking Expensive

9 Being Poor Isn’t a Crime—It Just Feels Like It

10 An Open Letter to Rich People

Afterword

Acknowledgments

Foreword

By Barbara Ehrenreich

I’ve been waiting for this book for a long time. Well, not this book, because I never imagined that the book I was waiting for would be so devastatingly smart and funny, so consistently entertaining and unflinchingly on target. In fact, I would like to have written it myself—if, that is, I had lived Linda Tirado’s life and extracted all the hard lessons she has learned. I am the author of Nickel and Dimed , which tells the story of my own brief attempt, as a semi-undercover journalist, to survive on low-wage retail and service jobs. Tirado is the real thing.

After my book came out in 2001, I spent over ten years on the road talking about it at union conferences, church gatherings, and mostly on college campuses. I did this partly for the money because I had lost my best-paying journalistic job in 1997, and then a few years later the media decided that writers no longer needed to be paid at all, as if writing involves no caloric expenditure whatsoever.

But I also did it because I was on a mission. People often asked how my work for Nickel and Dimed changed me, and I think they meant how did it make me, as a middle-class person, more aware of the poor. Well, I didn’t need that much more awareness since I was born into the lower rung of the working class and managed to re-land in it by becoming a single mother and then marrying a warehouse worker when I was in my thirties. So my stint as a low-wage worker/journalist had only one major effect on me: It moved me from concern about the exploitation of low-wage workers—to something more like rage.

I had expected to experience material deprivation in my life at $7 an hour (the equivalent of about $9 today), and I certainly did. The fact that I had some built-in privileges like a working car (I got a Rent-A-Wreck in each of the cities where I worked so I wouldn’t end up writing a book about waiting for buses) only made the deprivation part more shocking. Here I was—in good health, with no small children in my care—working full-time, sometimes more than one job at time, sometimes to the point where my legs felt like rubber, and I was living in a dump and dining at convenience stores or Wendy’s.

What I had not expected was the daily humiliation, the insults and what seemed like mean-spirited tricks. To be poor is to be treated like a criminal, under constant suspicion of drug use and theft. It means having no privacy, since the boss has the legal right to search your belongings for stolen items. It involves being jerked around unaccountably, like the time Wal-Mart suddenly changed my schedule, obliterating the second job I had lined up. It means being ordered to work through injuries and illness, like the debilitating rash I once acquired from industrial-strength cleaning fluids.

And what was most amazing to me: Being a low-wage worker means being robbed by the very employer who is monitoring you so insistently for theft. You can be forced to work overtime without pay or made to start working forty-five minutes before the time clock starts ticking. If you do the math, you may find that a few more hours have been shaved off your paycheck each week by the corporation’s computers.

But when I made my way from campus to campus, telling my stories about work and urging students to take an interest in all the low-wage workers who were making their education possible every day—the food service workers, janitors, clerical workers, and adjunct faculty—I was invariably asked the question that boils down to: What’s wrong with these people? Meaning the workers, not their bosses.

Typically, the questioner would be a frat boy who had taken Econ 101, a course which exists, as far as I can see, for the sole purpose of convincing young people that the existing class structure is just, fair, and unchangeable anyway. If there’s nothing wrong with our economic arrangements, then the only remaining question is: Why do these people have children, lack savings, fail to go to college, eat junk food, smoke cigarettes, or whatever else is imagined to be holding them back?

So when I came across Linda Tirado’s blog about six months ago, I felt an enormous wave of vindication. Even—or, perhaps, especially—her admission that she smokes cigarettes hit me like a gust of fresh air. She tells what it’s like to be a low-wage worker for the long term, with an erratically employed husband and two small children to raise and support. She makes all the points I have been trying to make in my years of campaigning for higher wages and workers’ rights: That poverty is not a culture or a character defect; it is a shortage of money. And that that shortage arises from grievously inadequate pay, aggravated by constant humiliation and stress, as well as outright predation by employers, credit companies, and even law enforcement agencies.

But let me get out of the way now. She can tell this so much better than I can.

Introduction

In the fall of 2013, I was in my first semester of school in a decade. I had two jobs; my husband, Tom, was working full-time; and we were raising our two small girls. It was the first time in years that we felt like maybe things were looking like they’d be okay for a while.

After a particularly grueling shift at work, I was unwinding online when I saw a question from someone on a forum I frequented: Why do poor people do things that seem so self-destructive? I thought I could at least explain what I’d seen and how I’d reacted to the pressures of being poor. I wrote my answer to the question, hit post, and didn’t think more about it for at least a few days. This is what it said:

WHY I MAKE TERRIBLE DECISIONS, OR, POVERTY THOUGHTS

There’s no way to structure this coherently. They are random observations that might help explain the mental processes. But often, I think that we look at the academic problems of poverty and have no idea of the why. We know the what and the how, and we can see systemic problems, but it’s rare to have a poor person actually explain it on their own behalf. So this is me doing that, sort of.

Rest is a luxury for the rich. I get up at 6 a.m., go to school (I have a full course load, but I only have to go to two in-person classes), then work, then I get the kids, then I pick up my husband, then I have half an hour to change and go to Job 2. I get home from that at around 12:30 a.m., then I have the rest of my classes and work to tend to. I’m in bed by 3. This isn’t every day, I have two days off a week from each of my obligations. I use that time to clean the house and soothe Mr. Martini and see the kids for longer than an hour and catch up on schoolwork. Those nights I’m in bed by midnight, but if I go to bed too early I won’t be able to stay up the other nights because I’ll fuck my pattern up, and I drive an hour home from Job 2 so I can’t afford to be sleepy. I never get a day off from work unless I am fairly sick. It doesn’t leave you much room to think about what you are doing, only to attend to the next thing and the next. Planning isn’t in the mix.

When I was pregnant the first time, I was living in a weekly motel for some time. I had a minifridge with no freezer and a microwave. I was on WIC. I ate peanut butter from the jar and frozen burritos because they were 12/$2. Had I had a stove, I couldn’t have made beef burritos that cheaply. And I needed the meat, I was pregnant. I might not have had any prenatal care, but I am intelligent enough to eat protein and iron whilst knocked up.

I know how to cook. I had to take Home Ec to graduate high school. Most people on my level didn’t. Broccoli is intimidating. You have to have a working stove, and pots, and spices, and you’ll have to do the dishes no matter how tired you are or they’ll attract bugs. It is a huge new skill for a lot of people. That’s not great, but it’s true. And if you fuck it up, you could make your family sick. We have learned not to try too hard to be middle class. It never works out well and always makes you feel worse for having tried and failed yet again. Better not to try. It makes more sense to get food that you know will be palatable and cheap and that keeps well. Junk food is a pleasure that we are allowed to have; why would we give that up? We have very few of them.

The closest Planned Parenthood to me is three hours. That’s a lot of money in gas. Lots of women can’t afford that, and even if you live near one you probably don’t want to be seen coming in and out in a lot of areas. We’re aware that we are not having kids, we’re breeding. We have kids for much the same reasons that I imagine rich people do. Urge to propagate and all. Nobody likes poor people procreating, but they judge abortion even harder.

Convenience food is just that. And we are not allowed many conveniences. Especially since the Patriot Act passed, it’s hard to get a bank account. But without one, you spend a lot of time figuring out where to cash a check and get money orders to pay bills. Most motels now have a no-credit-card-no-room policy. I wandered around SF for five hours in the rain once with nearly a thousand dollars on me and could not rent a room even if I gave them a $500 cash deposit and surrendered my cell phone to the desk to hold as surety.

Nobody gives enough thought to depression. You have to understand that we know that we will never not feel tired. We will never feel hopeful. We will never get a vacation. Ever. We know that the very act of being poor guarantees that we will never not be poor. It doesn’t give us much reason to improve ourselves. We don’t apply for jobs because we know we can’t afford to look nice enough to hold them. I would make a super legal secretary, but I’ve been turned down more than once because I don’t fit the image of the firm, which is a nice way of saying gtfo, pov. I am good enough to cook the food, hidden away in the kitchen, but my boss won’t make me a server because I don’t fit the corporate image. I am not beautiful. I have missing teeth and skin that looks like it will when you live on B12 and coffee and nicotine and no sleep. Beauty is a thing you get when you can afford it, and that’s how you get the job that you need in order to be beautiful. There isn’t much point trying.

Cooking attracts roaches. Nobody realizes that. I’ve spent a lot of hours impaling roach bodies and leaving them out on toothpick spikes to discourage others from entering. It doesn’t work, but is amusing.

Free only exists for rich people. It’s great that there’s a bowl of condoms at my school, but most poor people will never set foot on a college campus. We don’t belong there. There’s a clinic? Great! There’s still a copay. We’re not going. Besides, all they’ll tell you at the clinic is that you need to see a specialist, which, seriously? Might as well be located on Mars for how accessible it is. Low-cost and sliding scale sound like money you have to spend to me, and they can’t actually help you anyway.

I smoke. It’s expensive. It’s also the best option. You see, I am always, always exhausted. It’s a stimulant. When I am too tired to walk one more step, I can smoke and go for another hour. When I am enraged and beaten down and incapable of accomplishing one more thing, I can smoke and I feel a little better, just for a minute. It is the only relaxation I am allowed. It is not a good decision, but it is the only one that I have access to. It is the only thing I have found that keeps me from collapsing or exploding.

I make a lot of poor financial decisions. None of them matter, in the long term. I will never not be poor, so what

Reviews for Hand to Mouth

[davisfamily-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Written as if she were there talking.... Loudly.

[lschiff-742783 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Tirado provides a strong, clear depiction of what life in poverty is like for many people in the U.S. This is an important contribution to the discussion about inequality in this country, but it could have been more powerful with some better editing, or perhaps even as a series of essays as opposed to a book, which might have reached a larger audience. Still, I'm glad it's out there and I'm glad I read it.

[brianinbuffalo · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Let's not "bury the lead." Tirado's message is a critically important one — especially in this era. People in every income strata would benefit from the author's pointed insights. But I have two fundamental problems with "Hand to Mouth." The first involves content. The second involves literary tone. Let's start with content. This enlightening and often entertaining book was born after the author posted an essay on a web forum that answered someone's question about why many impoverished people make "self-destructive" decisions. Her pithy post went viral. Publications picked it up. She ultimately decided to turn it into a book. Here's the problem: There's just not quite enough content to justify a book-length manuscript -- even a slim volume. A three-part series of 2,500-word essays? Absolutely. Perhaps even a four-parter? Maybe. But there's a lot of redundancy here — slightly different anecdotes or insights served up to illustrate the same points that were adequately hit in earlier sections (why low-income people smoke, why they can't save, etc.) The second issue is literary tone. I had the distinct feeling throughout the book that there was an undercurrent of hosility and bitterness. I get it. Although I was born in a lower-middle class environment, I'm now grateful to be a financially-stable middle class guy. I've never had to live hand-to-mouth. Still, many of us who are at decent income tiers aren't entitled, nasty, greedy, ungrateful oafs who look down on others. We're good tippers. We try to "connect" with folks in the service sector. We enthusiastically support safety nets. Maybe it's just me, but I sensed a persistent thread of hostility. Tirado admits that she's angry a lot of the time. I give her credit for honesty. But the underlying hostility didn't underscore the message for me. It undermined it. When it comes to writing, Tirado is a skilled storyteller. I just wish she hadn't decided to make the F-word a frequent visitor in the manuscript. Believe me, I'm no prude. I even occasionally use the word. But I think the repeated use diminishes the message. True, the author explained early on that this is how she talks. I'm sure it was included to heighten authenticity. But I stopped counting after the tenth F-bomb. She even ended the tome by thanking many people and then adding: "Four of you can go F*!# yourself." Really? Having said all this, I'm glad I read the book. It's a vivid reminder of the inequities that exist.

[nmele_4 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Although it is already dated by the Draconian budget cuts made since 2017, this is still the best book I know that described what working poor people's lives are like. I haven't been poor for some time, but I haven't forgotten the desperate work schedules, the beat up car that is a necessity one prays will not die on the way to or from work and the tough decisions about what to spend my limited resources on. And I was a single male at the time, not a married mother of two. If you think poor people are responsible for their own problems, read this book and then read a more dispassionate economic treatise on why poverty affects so many Americans. And, as Tirado might have written, "and I'm a youngish white woman." Then imagine the predicament of a young black male.

[jwrudn · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A first person account of what it is like to be poor in America and why poor people make bad decisions. As bad as the poverty itself is being treated as if having no money is a crime. (It could be argued that having too much money is a crime).

[christina_e_mitchell · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I was really enjoying this book when I decided to read some Goodreads readers' reviews of Hand to Mouth. After my journey down the reviews rabbit hole, I found myself just as angry as Ms. Tirado. For fuck's sake, now none of us are the "correct" kind of poor to suit the Secure. Reading the reviews, I recognized some of the Blessed I sat next to in university espousing strong opinions about public policy without considering the consequences of the policy because they have been pretty much handed fucking everything their entire fucking lives. I also recognized some of the Sanctimonious who may have struggled in the past but decided all poor would make it beyond the struggle if they would only do what they did. (For me, I got tired of hearing the preaching of these Sanctimonious and subsequently chose spend my time in other company). If you have never struggled, quit being a judgmental asshole (a judgment I feel I have the right and the privilege to make). If you made it out of the struggle, quit being a judgmental asshole (a judgment I feel I have the right and the privilege to make). Here's the thing about Tirado's 195-page polemic: it is her experience and, therefore, requires not one bit of your blessed and sanctimonious permission to relate her experience and express her opinions. Period. Tirado's account of her experience is autoethnography. Perhaps you were absent or asleep the day they discussed the genre in Anthropology 101, Humanities 101, History 101, or Sociology 101 when you were attending your freshman year of college. (I know how inconvenient it is to give your attention to learning amongst all the frat parties and football games.) To remind you:
Autoethnography is a form of qualitative research in which an author uses self-reflection and writing to explore their personal experience and connect this autobiographical story to wider cultural, political, and social meanings and understandings.
If you wish to present your argument to me substantiating your review dismissing the value of Tirado's autoethnographic style, please set up an appointment. I am Christina E. Mitchell, Ph.D., a researcher grounded in the social sciences, published scholar, certified nonprofit professional, volunteer for a women's domestic violence shelter, and former single, teenage parent on welfare and food stamps.

As for the book, I can not relate to all of what Tirado says, but I can relate to a lot of it. I left the hospital with my new baby daughter under the suspicious, watchful, judgmental eye of a nurse. I encountered a nasty checkout clerk at Safeway when I dared patronize their upper-class store using food stamps to buy milk on my way home from work instead of driving the three extra miles to the grocery warehouse accepting of my kind of poor, white trash. I have worked for bathroom-regulating fast food and retail, which caused back problems that leaves my left foot chronically semi-numb. I've lived in Section 8 housing. I can still relate to Tirado because after acquiring $279,000 in student loan debt by listening to the Blessed and the Sanctimonious rattle on that an education is the ticket out of the struggle and into security, I am post-dissertation, graduated, unemployed, and living with my children. I have not seen a dentist or a medical doctor in I cannot tell you how long. (For a full run down of how fucking mad I am about this, you can read my polemic here.) The fact is the Blessed and the Sanctimonious and the Secure do not want any redneck trailer trash, or any other of the Struggling, messing up their clean, white, pleasant little worlds. If the Struggling try to cross the boundaries, they are immediately told, once again, to mind their places, which is exactly what I hear in the Goodreads reviews of Tirado's book. (Forgive us silly, silly, insignificant Peasants for daring to speak out loud.)

I'm sure if one looks hard enough in order to discredit me as several tried to discredit Tirado, one will find that, like Tirado, I was also the benefit of familial generosity during my struggle, which gratefully eased the pain a bit. I once rented a single-wide trailer owned by my parents, and my mom once bought me a washer and dryer. I was tremendously grateful for both gifts. I finally got off of welfare by going to community college to acquire secretarial skills. My daughter and I continued to struggle because of low wages, but my secretarial skills kept us housed (I even bought a USDA Section 8 home at one point), bought me a used 2001 Nissan Sentra (that I still drive), kept gas in the car, kept food on the table, and provided health insurance. I was tremendously grateful for the work. I was also tremendously grateful for the extra money I earned cleaning houses, bartending, and working for a caterer that gave us a few really fun vacations. (And, I offer a grateful Hallelujah! for the wine and beer I had to drink after my daughter went to bed.) But, being grateful does not mean I, or any of the Struggling, should have to put up with fucking Blessed, Sanctimonious, Secure assholes...which we must on a regular basis...seemingly until we die. Do the Struggling a favor, dear Blessed, Sanctimonious, and Secure, and put yourselves in the shoes of the Struggling for a minute and try to understand the lens through which you are seeing things. It is called reflexive practice. In research, this is the way researchers fight bias in their analysis. Not being honest about what one brings to the conversation - all of one's privileges, biases, discriminations, lived experiences, identities, etc. - means the opinion of the one brings nothing in substantive argument to discredit Tirado's sound advocacy through her own experience.

_____________________________
I wrote the above review in September 2016. It is now November 2016. Trump won the U.S. Presidential Election: a horrifyingly dystopian outcome that puzzles nearly everyone. We know white men overwhelmingly voted for Trump. We know many more than expected women, particularly white, educated women, voted for Trump. We know the upper middle-class to rich voted for Trump. We know many in the media are wondering why the white working class came out to vote when they hardly ever bothered to vote before.

I can read much into the election results, as are others (my social media accounts explode with my and others' opinions and diatribes), but I think what I read most is the same that I attempted to reflect in my review of Tirado's book: Blessed, Secure, Sanctimonious...and now add the Struggling... white people (mostly men) do not want "trash" infiltrating their beautifully white, pristine, privileged lives. The vote was to keep out people of color and the morally questionable (from a Sanctimonious, narrow-minded, seemingly though questionably faith-based point of view) from having even a small working-class portion of what has been drastically reduced amongst the Struggling in terms of living wages and economically secure opportunities, while the Blessed and Secure do not want any attempt at egalitarianism. So, the white working class (men) and the white uber rich (men) partnered up to bring the carnage we have today. And, where does that leave the rest of us? The working class people of color, the LGBTQ community, the immigrants, the refugees, the women, the poor...the marginalized "trash"? It leaves us more marginalized. With the election, we were told on no uncertain terms to mind our places. Well, fuck you! You did nothing in this election to help your narrow-minded, bigoted, misogynist cause. Rather, you exposed it, and we will fight it. What breaks my heart is the Sanctimonious, Struggling white working class had so much more power if partnered with us other "trash" leaving behind psuedo-polite, Blessed and Secure society (particularly since Trump IS "the establishment" fooling y'all so he can grab more for himself, his family, and his rich friends). What breaks my heart worse is those who should know better, the educated, refused to come down from their Ivory Tower to welcome the Struggling working class and "trash" of society into the hallowed halls in order to listen and give credence to their voices.

Heaven forgive us for what we have done.

[rivkat_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a short, punchy book that expands on Tirado’s viral explanation for why poor people make poor choices. Short answers: they’re poor, so making “good” choices is unlikely to help a lot; they’re exhausted after punishing schedules and being expected to perform emotional and physical labor for employers who don’t respect them; there often isn’t much “choice” about it in the short or medium term, as when she can’t afford to have her teeth fixed, so she can’t get jobs that require public contact/performing a middle-class identity. Man, we are fucked up.

[augustgarage-1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

A disorganized, incoherent, poorly written screed - her initial essay (itself similar to a Cracked article written by John Cheese) was worth reading and gave some insight into the mindset that a person might adopt when living under the stresses of precarity - but this book adds almost nothing to that original forum post. Chapter after chapter of attacks on straw-men with aimless anecdotes, unsupported arguments, humorless jokes, and free-associating jeremiads...one could learn more about the working poor in America from an episode of Roseanne.

It's too bad the discussion of this book seems to be exclusively about the reputation/veracity of its author, as the issues raised are themselves important - but whether or not Tirado invited such scrutiny, she is simply not a compelling (or perhaps even credible) voice for the underclass, and this book does little to inspire empathy for or conversations with those living in poverty.

[iowabooker · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

So much material and real life experience she connected with that I can identify with.

[jillrhudy · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Linda Tirado has some words for middle class and wealthy people who look down on her for having been poor.

None of them are printable in a polite book review.

Raw and anguished, this is a tell-all memoir by an intelligent woman who dropped out of college and lived for years on four hours' sleep working two low-paying jobs, with no dental care and almost no medical care.

She explains: obesity/poor diets, smoking, why she dared to have children, bad teeth, disability, rent-to-own, payday loan, refusing to use any bank outside of a Walmart, depression, housing dilemmas, child care worries, lack of dependable transportation, and being just plain trapped.

She has answers and explanations for all of this. People who are determined to blame the poor for their own fate will not buy any of them, of course. But that doesn't mean the answers and explanations are not very good ones.

[lisa2013_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This was a very engaging and entertaining book. The content is terrifying and depressing and enraging. The humor really helps. I had a hard time putting it down and an easy time reading it. If I hadn’t been concurrently reading a novel, I’d have finished it in one or two days. It’s thought provoking and I hope it might be a contributing catalyst for some social and political, and personal, change.

I’m grateful that even though she is writing about poverty in general, she is clear that she is speaking for her situation and acknowledges than 1/3 the United States population is not a homogeneous group, that there are significant differences in circumstances among the poor.

I wish that 40% through the book I hadn’t looked up the author, and seen the buzz about her, and her blog, and this book. I was able to just keep reading. What the author says seems authentic to me, and it’s clear that her circumstances changed several times, most notably when at one point she got family help to upgrade her living circumstances and again when she got the deal for this book. She’s writing about her experiences over time and I have no reason to question her.

I’ve always thought I didn’t have the courage to live in dire poverty, and this book validated that for me. Even before her book deal, the author had a good education and was smart and wrote well, and she had a husband and children and family of origin and friends who sometimes gave financial help.

I wish somebody older and less healthy and without any family, and on an even much lower income would write a book and relate their experiences, perhaps a group of people with varying experiences. It might be even more depressing but even more helpful.

I do hope that this book is widely read and that as a result people living in poverty will be better treated by individuals, workplaces, organizations, and the government.

I started my buddy read novel when I was less than ½ way through this but I was also able to read and finish this book, reading concurrently, and get it back to the library well ahead of its due date. If I’d been reading just this book I’m sure I’d have read it in one or two days at the most.

[sullywriter_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A raw, brutally honest account of what it's like to be one of the working poor in America. She knows it so well because she's lived it. From the 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 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."

[4leschats · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A poignant look at poverty in the US. Tirado, who has endured financial difficulties uses humor and first person insight to demonstrate the plight of the poor and to explain the difficulties of escaping poverty. She quickly recognizes that not all of her decisions make sense to the more affluent but shows how these choices are part of her socioeconomic condition.

[samsattler · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Although you would not guess it from her picture on the book jacket of Hand to Mouth, Linda Tirado is one angry young woman. She herself admits to being angry much of every single day of her life. What makes her angry, you wonder? It’s this: being poor and having to put up with a way of life she sees no end to despite what she considers her best efforts to break free from the cycle of poverty into which she was born. Only Tirado can say if she has given up on ever escaping poverty, but from the level of anger she so readily embraces, that just might be a safe bet.

That Linda Tirado knows of which she speaks is beyond dispute. She has the lifetime credentials so many of this country’s poor earn the hard way: through personal experience. She is an obviously intelligent and articulate woman and she hopes that more fortunate Americans are willing to listen to her for the two or three hours it takes to read her book.

I listened and I agree with much, maybe even most, of what she has to say about being stuck in low-paying jobs for the long term. Tirado’s points about how extremely difficult it is to escape the barely-making-ends-meet life are valid ones. As she says, it is near impossible to find a better paying job if you cannot afford a car to get you to that job; it is hard to go to school if you have to work two jobs just to pay the rent and put food on the table; it is near impossible to save for the future at the rate of five or ten dollars a paycheck if the first medical emergency that comes along is only going to wipe out your savings again.

Tirado, though, seems to have given in to the temptation to do more than just inform with this book. She wants to get even – at least a little. Even as she shoots down all the stereotypes that “rich people” hold about “poor people,” she gleefully embraces all the ones about rich people. She preaches tolerance and respect for the poorer segment of American society while ridiculing the rest of that same society. She demands respect but does not display any in reverse. She strays into politics but shows that she knows little more than liberal talking points, and she uses those points to distort the position of others with whom she disagrees. And, frankly, her “Open Letter to Rich People,” with which she ends the book, might be “cute” but its contemptuous tone makes it pretty much counterproductive.

The author paints everyone not living a life of poverty with the same brush, and we, of course, are not all the same. Many of us come from backgrounds very similar to hers (my own parents were sharecroppers who moved to a neighboring state in order to start a whole new life with little more than what they could carry with them in their old car – I grew up poor and did not escape that life until a good while after I married).

And that is a real shame because this book has a worthy message. But a little less anger would have gone a long way in getting that message across.

[carissaburks-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a no holds barred account of one woman's life and viewpoints of living in poverty. She makes sure the reader understands that she, in no way, speaks for people who are poor as a whole, but this is how she personally sees it and what she has personally gone through.

She is blunt. She is honest. Her voice is strong and there is no doubt what her point of view is. Some will most likely find it an uncomfortable read, others will feel unsettled by the language used or the no-nonsense attitude that Tirado takes in this book. It is raw, honest, and thought provoking.

It is something that most of America needs to read. Needs to use to help banish stereotypes and prejudices that they feed into whether on a conscious or unconscious level. Heck, it even points out the gross working conditions that many minimum wage workers are expected to work in and shows just how condescending some people can be. It encourages people to treat others just as they'd want to be treated; to treat others as human beings, as equals, as humans.

A few striking sentences from the book are:

"In short, calling me a meth user because I have bad teeth is about as valid as calling me a genius because I'm a fast reader. (Tirado, 35)"

and

"And next time you feel as though you're shouldering more than your fair share of society's burdens, ask yourself: How badly do I have to pee right now, and do I need permission? (Tirado, 191)"

She is not saying that "rich people" don't have problems or don't hit hardships. No, she points out that because they have money that have the capability to take more things for granted. The ability to fix those problems better or quicker than "poor people" can.

It's an easy read and definitely a book that people should give a chance.

(*Note I was given a free copy in exchange for an honest review through Goodreads Early Readers Giveaways.)