Bone of the Bone: Essays on America by a Daughter of the Working Class

The most poignant aspect of Frey’s fabrications was that his internal pain apparently outstripped external causes he could offer for explaining it.

But even if your ideas are superior, I am asking you to consider that you did not arrive at them because of your innate superiority. Depending on your level of social privilege, you arrived at them because of your life experiences, your information sources, your community influences.

When it comes to economic risk, what appears reckless to the privileged is often the smartest bet to the poor.

In recent years many have questioned a degree’s value and chastised those who take out big loans to buy one. Most of those critics, I’d wager, never worked a wheat field. Debt burden and being overeducated in an employer’s market is psychologically and financially crushing, yes, but an assured lifetime sentence to manual labor can be more crushing—

Beyond my gender, as a White woman no other means of erasure remained; society’s disregard for its elders would find me, if I lived to old age, but for the moment I had outlasted familiar means of objectification, diminishment, or discrimination. I was no longer poor, I was able-bodied, and every intimate who ever refused to acknowledge my value wa

her brilliance challenges the widespread understanding of financial struggle as the result of stupidity and laziness.

The people lonely at the top by way of its sparse population were probably lonely at the bottom for different reasons.

Mobility is a virtue of freedom. Staying—or returning—is an equal virtue.

class isn’t static or definitive.