My passion is giving a voice to the invisible populations who live, work, and raise their families while experiencing food and housing insecurity in America. In my New York Times bestselling memoir MAID, I tell my story of juggling several housecleaning clients while working my way through college as a single mother. We were barely scraping by, struggling through a system of government assistance that more often pulls poor people back into poverty rather than lifting them out.
My writing as a journalist and my advocacy as a public speaker are fueled by my own experiences. I aspire to use my stories to expose the reality of what it’s like to pursue the myth of the American Dream while being held back at the poverty line. Too often these stories aren’t being told.
I want to change that.
Every day, over 2.5 million nannies, house cleaners and care workers do the work of caring and cleaning in our homes. The majority of these workers are women, mostly women of color, who immigrated here in hope of a better life. They take care of what is most important to us, yet they are often the least valued and most vulnerable.
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Even though MAID is just my story, I hope that readers will start seeing the estimated 60 million Americans who are working so hard just to make ends meet.
There is a myth in this country that if you work hard, play by the rules, and pull yourself up by the bootstraps, you’ll make it. For those who believe that myth, they also believe that if you’re not making it, you’re simply not working hard enough. But the math doesn’t add up when we’re still fighting for a $15 minimum wage, and estimates say a single parent would need to make at least $30 an hour to make ends meet, or work 140 hours a week at a minimum wage job.
I aim to continue raising my voice, speaking up for the invisible people who are struggling to survive like I did.
Please feel free to look around, contact me with questions, or inquire about interviews, articles, speaking or teaching opportunities.
Thank you for listening, and for being here.
I know how grueling the job can be, and I swore I’d never ask someone to do it for me. But then I found myself in need of help.
Let me tell you something you already know: Your housekeeper spies on you.
We work alone. We get bored. What do you expect?
In my mind, the scene of the accident was always the same. It didn’t clearly make sense how it happened, but that didn’t matter. When it played out behind my closed eyelids, I saw my truck, a late-Eighties Toyota 4Runner, stopped…
Minimalism is a virtue only when it’s a choice, and it’s telling that its fan base is clustered in the well-off middle class. For people who are not so well off, the idea of opting to have even less is not really an option.
At the start of my 10-minute break during a two-hour writing workshop, I looked down to check my phone. I had three missed calls and five text messages, all from the friend who was supposed to be watching my daughter.
It didn’t take me long to go from financial stability to fearing homelessness. In January 2014 I was 35-years-old, raising a six-year-old nearly full-time and six months pregnant without a partner.
