Reviewed in Literary Mama
Reviews | November/December 2023

Writing Her Way Through Poverty: A Review of Class
By Shellie Kalinsky
Class: A Memoir of Motherhood, Hunger, and Higher Education
by Stephanie Land
Atria/One Signal Publishers, 2023; 288pp; $28.00
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It’s not easy to follow your dreams when you’re an outsider. As a fifty-four-year-old mother and grandmother in graduate school for creative writing, I sometimes feel like the oddball of my MFA cohort. Fortunately, I have a strong support network of family and friends that I can lean on while pursuing my education. Stephanie Land did not have the same kind of support, and that’s one of the themes of her new memoir, Class, which explores how Land earned her degree as a single mom navigating school, work, and parenting while living in poverty.

Class book cover
Class continues the story Land started in her debut memoir, Maid, a book that became a New York Times bestseller and Netflix series. Maid tells how Land escaped an abusive relationship with the father of her child and found a path to college through the help of scholarships, loans, and public assistance.

In Class Land is now a 35-year-old undergraduate and a single mother living in poverty with her kindergarten-aged daughter, Emilia, in Missoula, Montana. In honest, clean prose, she describes their life on the margins. “Most of my time as a mother had been spent weighing the pros and cons between a horrible and not-so-great situation. There was hardly ever a good choice.” A broken-down car means no way to get to school or work; no money means nothing to eat but peanut butter until next month’s government SNAP benefit is deposited into her account. Their apartment thermostat won’t heat above 65 degrees. It gets worse when the temperature falls below freezing outside. When it becomes a matter of survival, Land brings portable heaters into the house. “I stopped caring if my landlords would find out,” she says. “I tried to imagine a baby crawling on the freezing floor. Add that to the feral cat who lived under the front porch of the house that Emilia and I were allergic to, the mildew and mold growing in the bathroom, and it was a perfect formula for constant illness.”

Land’s situation is both precarious and humiliating. Each time she submits paperwork to recertify her eligibility for food stamps, she is forced to undergo a microscopic examination of her life, as if she were attempting to cheat the government. “These invasions of privacy caused me to fidget and squirm but I submitted to them, like everything else, because it was another means to an end,” she recalls. On Emilia’s first day of kindergarten, the cafeteria cashier loudly calls Emilia “a free meal kid.” When Land later receives her SNAP recertification, the benefit has been reduced because Emilia is now in school during the day. Readers feel the discomfort and shame heaped on Land’s shoulders. It’s both heartbreaking and infuriating.

In addition to government assistance, Land combines funds from a partial scholarship, Pell grants, and student loans to cover her education and living expenses. Some readers might wonder why she doesn’t leave school, work full-time until Emilia is older, then return to her studies later. But all mothers who have faced the impossible task of shrinking our career aspirations into smaller and smaller vessels while we pour ourselves into our children understand why Land presses on.

When Land was younger, she was obsessed with writing. Before motherhood she claimed her diaries would be the first thing she’d grab if her house caught fire. Later she reflects, “Now I had to dig them out of my basement. This downright poetic indication of their lower status in my life created an indescribable discomfort in the deepest center of my chest. The last time I had looked at these things, motherhood hadn’t yet consumed me.”

Then, in Land’s senior year at Montana’s creative writing program, a professor calls her writing “solid gold.” Another professor predicts Land’s success: “This is going to be a book. This is going to be a movie!” Their words inspire her to apply to the university’s prestigious MFA program, despite pressure to earn wages. When a judge in her child support case says she is “voluntarily underemployed” and insinuates Land is a grifter because she lacks full-time employment, she thinks: “This was a child support hearing, not a criminal case, but I felt like I’d been charged with negligence or worse, and I needed to defend myself for going to college.”

At times I wondered whether Land would fall into deeper debt or successfully claw her way out of poverty. Her monthly budget covers only minimum payments on student loans she accrued from her undergraduate studies in Alaska, she needs roommates to help cover her rent, and she runs out of food and money before the end of the month. She says of her student loans, “Given the monumental sum, I knew with certainty that I would have that debt for the rest of my life.” Almost every decision Land makes is measured against its cost. When she takes Emilia for a special ice cream treat, the moment is clouded by the knowledge that money spent on ice cream is money unavailable for groceries. Unlike her carefree classmates who party hop every weekend or the well-dressed married moms who mingle at the bus stop, Land navigates these hardships alone. “My desire was for the overwhelming feelings of desperation, of panic and having nowhere to turn and disaster always breathing down my neck, to end.”

At one point in her studies, Land seeks guidance from the program’s director, a woman who had attended graduate school as a single mother, written a book about it, and gone on to lead the department. Land hopes the director will be a mentor, but she turns out to be another gatekeeper who tells Land the department won’t be able to help her with graduate school. Later she criticizes Land’s writing, calling it relentless. Land uses her disapproval as fuel for her work. In her notebook she writes, “My life may be relentless but goddammit so am I.”

The most compelling part of Land’s story is that despite all of these obstacles, she keeps going: “Every time I wanted to cry from the crushing hopelessness that life seemed to bring, something inside me hissed you must not allow yourself to fall apart.” She does it for Emilia. “I needed her to know I was good at this thing I fought so hard to become.”

As a mother there were times I chose to put my education and career on hold because I couldn’t juggle it all. I felt like I had failed. Reading how Land found a way through all of her difficulties inspires me to keep going with my own writing now. It reminds me that the only way through the hard moments is to never give up.

Land narrates her journey with a straightforward voice that seeks neither praise nor pity. “It’s not that I wanted things to be easy, but a little less hard would be nice,” she says. From navigating the byzantine financial aid process to finding student housing as a single mother, her story exposes indignities in our socioeconomic structure and reveals the inequitable nature of higher education. “I had forgotten the part of the game where no one’s education mattered more than the money the university could make from your opportunity to soak up all that learning. God forbid they would make it affordable or easy.”

At its core, Class is about how deeply a mother can love her child while at the same time trying to love herself. Land wants more than anything to be a writer—and a mother. Against impossible odds, she is both.


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CLASS by Stephanie Land (Maid) is subtitled "A Memoir of Motherhood, Hunger, and Higher Education." It's an eye-opening non-fiction work that describes the difficulties of attending college as a single mom. Land relates her own experiences while also exploring social justice issues like food and housing insecurity, pointing out: "The fight to make rent, eat, and find childcare was constant. I never got a break from it." Her struggles and loneliness will elicit empathy from readers while also encouraging them to think about questions such as "Who has the right to go to college? And what kind of work is valued in our culture?" For a preview of her writing style, see the Op-Ed piece in The New York Times. There she weaves in statistics like "23 percent of undergraduate students and 12 percent of graduate students face food insecurity" while also relating a harrowing after school experience for her young daughter. CLASS received a starred review from Publishers Weekly and is a LibraryReads selection for November. Land says that she shares these stories in order to let people know their feelings are valid: that life does indeed feel impossible at times. If you are interested in hearing more, Land will be speaking at an upcoming Family Action Network event on November 13 at 7:00pm. Access is available via Zoom.

Thank you Atria for this copy (and to S&S BookClub favorites for a physical copy). Class by Stephanie Land is excellent, I am the kind of reader who wants to dive into themes on college and learning in memoirs, I loved Educated, The Glass Castle and this fits in with those memoirs at least for me. At times it's important to sit with the ideas about who gets to go to college, who gets to be successful in college (and what is success in college anyway), and then to think about bigger themes on art and creativity and motivation. What does it mean to dream big but struggle with day to day challenges?
I appreciate the advocacy Stephanie Land does and her openness to using her voice, her writing, and her experience to highlight challenges and inequities in education.

I truly appreciated the authors first book Maid that walked us through her struggles of being a single parent struggling with emotional and physical abuse and trying to survive. So I was excited to receive her next book Class that continues her journey from the publisher and to hear it’s the Good Morning America book pick!
Class continues the authors journey she is now thirty five and she has moved to Montana with her daughter so she can go to college and get her English degree. We are taken on Stephanie’s journey as she is attending school to get her BA in English, she relays her challenges and complications that go with single parenting, low income, and juggling work with a school schedule for both her and her daughter. I truly appreciated her brutal honesty and she doesn’t try to portray herself as a perfect mom but a woman trying to survive in a system that looks down and judges her. It honesty amazes me that one small thing can literally take food from her and her daughters mouth. The government preaches they want people to work and make a life for themselves, yet they turn up their noses when a person wants to go to school to make a better life for themselves , and if they are a single parent they aren’t willing to help but call them lazy if they don’t work full time.
This book shows you that if you ever have a dream of a better life, and are willing to have motherhood and education and dream of a better future for you and your family you deserve and just because your living at the poverty line your are still allowed to have hopes and dreams,! This book is yet another story of how flawed are government system is and that it still needs major work. The story is emotional and really kept me turning the pages and I finished the book in two days, I truly appreciate Stephanie Land sharing her story with us.

This memoir follows Ms. Land as she works hard to complete college and become a writer, while raising her daughter with minimal child support. It is an interesting account of food disparity and stretching a budget to make ends meet. Faced with difficult decisions & frequent prejudice she fights to break stereotypes and show she is a force to be reckoned with. An interesting especially for fans of her previous book, Maid. Thanks to Atria and NetGalley for this ARC. This is my honest review.

I absolutely loved Maid and so when I saw Class on NetGalley I began crossing fingers and hoping I would be approved to read it as an arc. While Class was different from Maid in a lot of ways, there were still things that made me feel so connected to Land and the challenges she faced as a result of poverty.

In Class we find Stephanie and her daughter Emilia living in a college town with Stephanie finishing up her Bachelor of Arts and Emilia starting Kindergarten. Despite being a full time student and having student loans, Stephanie still needs to do odd jobs such as babysitting and house keeping in order to have enough food for her and Emilia. Her Ex is as controlling and abusive as ever, even though he is further away now and her lack of familial support is the same, as is the limited social services that are just as challenging to navigate. Poverty is of course a thread throughout and the way that Stephanie and Emilia are treated because they are experiencing poverty continues to be a heartbreaking and incredibly frustrating series of events as well.

Land does a really great job of explaining why poverty is a continuous circle through her life examples and the messages that she is receiving from those around her in those difficult moments. For example, Stephanie is trying to finish university so that she can have a better chance at getting a profitable career in writing. To do that, she needs government funding and what she tries to explain to endless numbers of workers in various social services sectors is that a short-term investment to help her and Emilia survive these next months and years will allow her to be a self-sufficient hard working professional a few years down the road. But the system is not set up for that, and thus the cycle of poverty continues because people who want an education to better their lives often can't afford to get it.

As in Maid I connected with both Stephanie and Emilia both in their experiences and their feelings. Stephanie is able to describe childhood trauma as an adult who experienced her own trauma, and as an adult witnessing it in the child she cares for. Often memoirs about trauma show a person who experiences childhood trauma and then struggles with that trauma throughout their life, but rarely has the person worked through the trauma so significantly that they are able to witness the signs and reflect on them when raising their children. This is intergenerational trauma in its essence.

Whether you are a childhood trauma survivor, someone who has experienced poverty, someone who works with either of the above or a person who has limited understanding of trauma or poverty, you need to read these books. I know, that description covers almost all people, and it is meant to. This series is informative, interesting and important for everyone to read, if for nothing else because, to quote Land: "Empathy takes work" And by reading this book you are putting in the minimum amount of work required to become empathetic.

From the writer that inspired the Netflix series, Maid. This story follows Stephanie Land, who is now finishing up her college degree and raising her daughter while also fighting with her baby daddy for child support. She probably could have given up on her degree and started working so she could better support her daughter and herself. However, I admired her for her tenacity in escaping an abusive relationship, without any support from her family and trying to get her college degree. She is a great writer and does a great job of describing what it was like living below the poverty line and trying to escape it while raising her kids. While many could be frustrated at her life choices, it was important to remember that she living below the poverty line, had recently escaped an abusive relationship, and had no support from her family members. The only ones that really seemed to support her were her teachers and some of her friends.

Thanks to Netgalley, Atria Books, and the author for early access to this memoir.

This review is hard to write because I was so disappointed in this book. I loved her first book Maid,
I understand that the author is living in very difficult circumstances, and when reading Maid I really found myself rooting for her. When reading Class, I found that a lot of the decisions she was making weren’t the most responsible choices. I struggled reading about her being so exhausted and not able to find childcare to work, but when her daughter was away with her father she was out drinking and partying.
While I do not doubt that her situation is hard, I don’t think this book gave me the same feelings I got from her first book. It seems in this follow up I’m reading about someone making poor choices which are making her difficult situation even harder. I didn’t get the same feelings from her first book.

Stephanie shares her experiences as a single mom while earning a college degree in writing. Stephanie is a great storyteller. Even though I didn’t have kids during my college years, I could relate to the financial and time stresses of being a student. At times it was a bit depressing to read because she is sharing the difficult times in her life while trying to protect her daughter from a verbally abusive father. I skipped over the paragraphs about her romantic interludes because it was too spicy for me. My favorite part of the book is at the end when she delivers her second daughter, Coraline. What a sweet, tender moment in the book.

Thank you to NetGalley and Atria Books for the ARC in exchange for my honest review!

I remember enjoying Maid when it came out but this book seemed sort of rushed and unfinished. I think it must have been written after the popularity of the Netflix series based on Maid but it lacked depth. I don"t know if so much time has pasted it's not as fresh in her mind anymore or if she really was in a hurry but I didn't get a lot of insight or introspection in this one. It wasn't bad, it was just blah.

So was super excited to get a copy of the follow up to Maid, loved the show and let me just say this was a let down for me. Stephanie is VERY whiny, numerous times she does things that just have you thinking WHY? Why would a sane person do that or make that choice? And then some very different viewpoints on systems that are in place to help and aid….just overall left me annoyed and disappointed. The writing honestly is all over the place and not easy to follow. Kinda mad that I wasted time on this one.

Trigger warnings: abortion, derogatory religious perspectives, language.

Thanks to Netgalley and Atria Books for my electronic advanced reader copy in exchange for my honest review. All opinions are my own.

Stephanie Land’s first book MAID was a rightfully-deserved bestseller and became a hit Netflix show. CLASS chronicles her struggles to attend college as a single mother, living below the poverty line and constantly fighting a system designed to keep her down.

Land writes with brutal honesty about college instructors who casually toss out cruel comments, food insecurity and basically being one step away from catastrophe: “Questioning the logic was useless, since there simply wasn’t any. All government assistance programs operated on the assumption that every person who walked into their office brought with them the possibility of scamming them in some way.”

While pursuing a 4-year education might be a given for many people, for Land it was a near-constant battle. She was continually having to justify her college degree to her abusive ex and to the family courts. She often felt guilty for just wanting a night out, a weekend alone or a cup of coffee from the local coffee shop. (“The paranoia that I would somehow get caught in a frivolous moment never left me. After several years on government assistance, my value as a member of society no longer seemed to be my education, but rather the low-wage work I would potentially do to make life easier in some way for a person whose family could afford to pay for them to go to college.”)

Despite all of this, Land graduated from the University of Montana with a degree in English and rest, as they say, is history. CLASS is a story of resilience and pursuing your dreams. Land never gave up even when it seemed that everyone was betting on her to fail. Highly recommend this inspiring memoir.

Wow, this was really powerful, albeit frustrating when certain risks were taken--however, it wasn't my story to tell.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I read Maid and was looking forward to it. It was an interesting perspective of the struggles she had. I think that people who enjoyed Maid will also enjoy Class.

I absolutely loved Maid, so I was excited to receive an advance reader copy of Class. Class continues Stephanie Land’s story as she continues in her college studies. The amount of obstacles she has to overcome is astounding, but she is determined to finish college. Just like Maid, this book is the story of the working poor in the US, and it tells how hard it is to get ahead. Great book! Thank you, NetGalley, for the copy!

I would think it would be quite intimidating as an author to follow up a debut like Maid, an international bestseller turned Netflix series, but Stephanie Land did an admirable job with her second memoir, Class, which has the reader following her during her senior year of college as she struggles to balance finishing her education, raising her daughter, and becoming pregnant with her second child all while living under the poverty line and struggling - literally - to keep food on the table. While Maid was extremely impactful as an examination of poverty and single motherhood in our country, Class feels much more personal to the author. The same themes are explored, of course, but there’s something more intimate about the slice of life we get here. That said, it still felt somewhat arms-length (I found it strange, for example, that there was no explanation or even parenthetical aside about why her daughter Mia now went by her full name Emilia) and I struggled to empathize with many of her decisions, which made it hard to get through at times. Being uncomfortable with her circumstances, however, is often the point, so I don’t fault her for that. And while I wasn’t always engaged 100%, her writing is great. I’m hesitant to label anyone’s personal story with a star rating but for me as a reader this was 3.5 stars, rounded up to 4 for Goodreads.

Pub Date: 11/7/23
Review Published: 11/4/23

Sophomore memoirist's efforts are often a disappointment, and Class lacks the novelty and freshness of Maid. In her latest memoir, Land remains a single parent, earns a barely living wage as a housecleaner, and is a full-time college student, although she questions the worth of a degree in English and the need to take on additional debt to obtain the masters degree which she believes will be the gateway to stable employment with benefits. Land again outlines the tension she has with her daughter, Emilia’s, father who reneges on his obligation to spend six weeks in the summer with their daughter, which would have enabled Land to take on additional work to pay down her credit card debt, to spend time with friends, and to go out on a date. Less visitation means that Land could have her support modified; however, she learns that she would not hear back from the Portland child support office for “six months to a year.” She chronicles the back-breaking work, the mountains of laundry, and homework that consumes her waking hours: “The fight to make rent, eat, and find child care was constant. I never got a break from it.” She also recites the loneliness of battling food and housing insecurity and the inability to forge a relationship when the men she dated realized that “the kid I usually had around changed from a playmate to a responsibility.”

Although statistics show that a college degree helps break the cycle of poverty, Land’s memoir raises questions regarding whether an advanced degree in fine arts is a worthy endeavor when jobs in academia are notoriously difficult to procure and, despite writing a surprise bestseller which was adopted into a hit Netflix series, Land recently told the New York Times that she remains worried about job security. Perhaps Emilia’s father was not incorrect when he said a fine arts degree was a “selfish” pursuit. Many of us work in jobs that pay the bills but do not fulfill our childhood dreams. Land also had a second child despite having had a prior abortion and chronicling the barriers she encountered, such as reliable, no-cost child care, as a single parent trying to compete her college degree. Her response to naysayers is, “becoming pregnant and choosing to have the baby was, ultimately, my right.” But is it when she cannot feed, clothe, and house the child she already has without government assistance. Although I admire her grit and determination, I do question her choices.

Class: A Memoir of Motherhood, Hunger, and Higher Education, by Stephanie Land, is the story of the author's struggle to get an education to build a career to provide for her children. In some ways, this is the quintessential American "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" tale, with a few exceptions. It is hard, so hard...every day, hard to scrape the money together, to make the food last, to heat one room and try to not only keep your child alive and wet, to not only protect her from harm but to encourage her, build her self-esteem, insure she learns and has fun. For all practical purposes, the author was abandoned by parents and siblings. Not surprisingly, she was a perfect target for emotional abuse. As bad as that was, she had to endure the struggle to deal with bureaucratic lunacy in order to get the assistance she was entitled to by law. Nonetheless, the process by which you receive what you need deprives you of your sense of worth and energy. She conveys that she always feels judged, and she is always judging herself and her decisions. She is not wrong...those with privilege, whether inherited, graced by luck, or self-earned, often do judge those that have not yet reached a comfortable landing.

Land is a gifted, talented writer who shares her struggle with brutal honesty. Her writing conveys the entire spectrum of emotion. I read the book in two days, and have much to think about and process. For now, it is enough that I hope to never judge the person next to me, never feel superior, and try to help when I can. I have no idea what they are going through. I know that but for the untold benefit of circumstance and luck, there go I.

I highly recommend this book. Thank you to NetGalley and Atria Books for allowing me to read a digital ARC.

I read this book for free thanks to NetGalley in exchange for my honest feedback.

This memoir was extremely well written, with a good flow of events. My only complaint is that her daughter seems to be 6 for several years.

I could relate to the authors struggles, although thankfully I've never experienced the same level of poverty.

I wasn't sure I wanted to read this book as I like the TV show for Maid better than her book. (Though i did like the book) But Class was excellent. I loved reading the rest of her story. Ms Land is a great storyteller who engages her readers.