Home, with Lauren Sandler
“How does it actually feel to inhabit another person’s experience as much as we possibly can?”
About the Guest
Lauren Sandler is an award-winning journalist and author based in Brooklyn. Her books include is the bestselling This Is All I Got: A New Mother’s Search for Home, One and Only: The Freedom of Having an Only Child, and the Joy of Being One and Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement. Lauren's essays and features have appeared in dozens of publications including Time, The New York Times, Slate, The Atlantic, The Nation, The New Republic, The Guardian, New York Magazine, and Elle. She has been on staff at Salon and at NPR, where she worked on All Things Considered, Morning Edition, Weekend Edition, and the Cultural Desk.
Best Books
This is All I Got: A New Mother’s Search for Home, by Lauren Sandler.
Lauren recommended:
Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf.
The Road, by Cormac McCarthy.
Transcript
LAUREN SANDLER: Many of us can't make a massive difference individually. But we can as a collective
BLAIR HODGES: Lauren Sandler was a journalist covering homelessness in New York City when she met Camilla, a woman without a home who didn’t seem to fit the homeless stereotype at all.
LAUREN SANDLER: The first time that I saw Camilla, she was like dressed out of a J. Crew catalog perfect makeup, incredibly pale skin, incredibly thin, perfectly curled hair, sitting with like a little Kate Spade bag on her lap. And she was just like the picture of this sort of beauty and poise.
BLAIR HODGES: Not only all that, but Camilla was pregnant, too. And a criminal justice student who understood all the ins and outs of the social services system like nobody Lauren had ever seen before.
LAUREN SANDLER: And I just had this moment where I thought, I need to see how this person makes it out of the situation that she's in. Because if she can't, then who can?
BLAIR HODGES: Watching Camilla brought Lauren face to face with her own privilege and good fortune in a way that would challenge anyone’s idea of the American Dream.
Welcome back to Fireside with Blair Hodges. Lauren Sandler joins us by the fire to talk about her book This Is All I Got: A New Mother’s Search For Home. It’s an up close and personal story of one woman who shares the fate of millions of Americans battling homelessness and the stunning boring inefficient bureaucracy of it all.
LAUREN SANDLER: We're talking about a massive population of people who imagine their lives just the same way, who have just the same skills, and just the same right to a life of meaning and self-actualization, and yet, are just spending their lives in these waiting rooms. Spending their lives doing paperwork that feels like it's out of Kafka or Orwell. It's just...It's mind boggling. And it's not accidental.
BLAIR HODGES: This is episode nine. Home.
What homelessness looks like - 1:48
BLAIR HODGES: Lauren Sandler joins us from Brooklyn today. Lauren, welcome to Fireside.
LAUREN SANDLER: Hi Blair. I'm so happy to be here.
BLAIR HODGES: We're talking about a book that you published a little while ago called This is All I Got: A New Mother’s Search for Home. And before you started on this particular project, what came to mind for you when you thought about the word homeless?
LAUREN SANDLER: Ah, it's such a good question. It is a word that has been significant to me for a really long time. You know, I'm someone who's always grown up in in urban environments where homelessness is very present. I grew up in the Boston area in the 70s and 80s where it was just a common thing to see people sleeping on the street. And then I moved to New York in 1992, when homelessness was considered a national epidemic. There were between one and two stories about homelessness in the New York Times every single day back then. And that's when, at least in New York, we had 20,000 people a night sleeping in city shelters.
When I started reporting my book, that number had more than tripled, and we had stopped talking about it. And so my initial sense of homelessness was very much like an urban street homelessness, which is a mistaken sense of homelessness. What that word represented to me was not the right thing. It was limited, right? It's what we often picture.
BLAIR HODGES: Is this sort of like the solitary man, bearded, sitting on a sidewalk with a cardboard sign, and like that is homeless?
LAUREN SANDLER: Totally, that's completely what it was in my mind for so long, when, of course, we know that for a lot of people homelessness is sleeping in your car, or crashing on a friend's couch.
Or for many people, like the protagonist of my book, who's a very real person named Camilla, it means being on the subway in full makeup and clothes from H&M like everyone else who's on the subway, and not being recognizably homeless at all. But then taking your baby home to a shelter at night and not knowing how to find stability because the system is so hellbent against her finding stability.
And so I would say that it is something that has expanded with, not just my reporting, but just my awareness of how multi-layered and distinctive this problem is all throughout the United States. So, you know, homelessness looks different in Provo, for example, than it does in Time Square. And yet the systemic roots are the same.
BLAIR HODGES: And you mentioned how media coverage dropped off. What do you attribute that to? How did it disappear from the pages even as it was increasing?
LAUREN SANDLER: Ah, man, I mean, we could tell a really long heartbreaking story about the shift to the Right in normative culture, about readers determining so much of what gets reported now because clicks are measured in different ways, about the growing power of luxury goods and luxury advertising.
I mean, you know, I became a journalist in the mid-nineties, just as the internet was really kind of taking off, right after Salon and Slate launched. I actually started off at NPR. So I knew a not-for-profit model where readers and consumers were not driving topics in quite the same way and where it felt like there was a real appetite to go deep and tell much harder stories—stories that are painful, stories that are intractable. And I think that, increasingly, our media landscape is one that just feeds people what they want.
And that's also true for publishing. I mean, it was really hard to find a publisher who wanted to, you know—that's not true. It wasn't really hard. It wasn't the slam-easy-dunk that we thought it was going to be to sell a book which was narrative nonfiction, reads like a novel, suspenseful, dynamic, a gorgeous tenacious central female character, story of motherhood, like my agent thought that this book had everything and that every—
BLAIR HODGES: It's made for a film like, where is the movie?
LAUREN SANDLER: Totally! Well, that's a different conversation that we can have, which is also a cranky one.
BLAIR HODGES: [laughs] Okay.
LAUREN SANDLER: But, you know, the feeling meeting with publishers was like, “well, we had the book Random Family already.” And Random Family is an incredible book by a writer named Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, which she reported in the nineties, in a totally different era, a totally different New York, and it felt like God, so we get to have—it isn't even about homelessness, but it's like we get to have the one immersive book about a family in poverty. You know, now we have Andrea Elliot's Invisible Child, but it's like, we have to wait twenty years between these books while we keep telling the same stories about people in different classes in different crises that aren't necessarily this one over and over.
I do think that there's a bit of a shift right now, which is a good thing. But yeah, I mean, in terms of our media landscape representing the lives of people who actually live in this country, in any form of demographic, I mean, I think we all know how skewed it is, and how this is what happens when you have a totally advertiser-driven capitalist system that tells us what is real and what we should care about and why.
The power of personal stories - 6:57
BLAIR HODGES: Okay, so you've given a pretty good glimpse of what the book is. It's not a data dump. It's not just a bunch of statistics. But you do start the book out by pointing some things out, sort of like you wanted to get the stats out of the way before you can dive into this personal story.
So for example, you note how most people in poverty are women of color, are single moms, there's a staggering statistic that one in thirty kids in America is homeless, it's 2.5 million kids. So you get a lot of these stats out of the way. But then you dive into this really personal story. Is this a book that you had a clear vision for? Or did it emerge in the process of doing reporting about homelessness?
LAUREN SANDLER: This is a book I had a very clear vision for. I was feeling very deeply that those statistics—and by the way, those are pre pandemic statistics.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
LAUREN SANDLER: They are much worse now. And in fact, they're quite unknown now. They're also statistics that, as eviction moratoriums begin to lift throughout the country are, it's just going to be a tidal wave.
But we'll save that heartbreak for another part of this conversation, perhaps. In terms of the authorial vision, you know, I'm a journalist, but I really read novels. I mean, I read a lot of nonfiction. But when I think about what has most moved my heart though, the moments in which I really find books working their magic, it's always character-driven narrative, which is usually fiction. Sometimes it's narrative nonfiction. But to me, you know, there are people doing data journalism, good data journalism, we have numbers, there's a ton of information out there. But unless we can actually feel how those numbers are lived, not just like, in a short form, try to imagine it, but how does it actually feel to inhabit another person's experience as much as we possibly can? That was the purpose for me.
I mean, I think that the numbers can be scary and overwhelming, and don't really, they can feel like...
BLAIR HODGES: I can't wrap my head around them, really.
LAUREN SANDLER: I mean, it's shocking. It's shocking. And I do believe it's the measure of our society. But there is such an overwhelm to that, we almost shut down about it. I think it's hard to have your hearts and minds change—the hearts and minds of the society—by looking at graphs.
BLAIR HODGES: I think we're seeing that with COVID as well, with death numbers.
LAUREN SANDLER: Absolutely.
BLAIR HODGES: This same thing, we see these numbers, and it can seem like just a number, same as with these numbers of homelessness.
LAUREN SANDLER: It's inuring. And you know, in some ways, it is quite literally dehumanizing, it is turning people into numbers. And frankly, these are people who, if they're in our social services system already live as nothing more than their number, usually, in the social service system. And so it was really, really important to me to give a reader an experience of this is what it feels like.
And you know what? It might not feel the way that you expect it to feel. There are complications, there are ups and downs, there are ways of seeing it as so much worse than you might know it might be and also feeling moments of hope, feeling that hope crushed, you know, having the whole process of life lived out, you know? That's the magic that books do is you can step inside another person's life. So that was really my goal.
And in fact, it was the original idea—so this book follows one woman very, very closely from the day that her baby is born, she goes into labor in her shelter in Brooklyn, and all the way through her first year of motherhood for her baby's first birthday. But initially, the idea was to focus on four women, I started doing some reporting in a shelter. And I was going to situate the whole book in the shelter. But then I learned, oh, right, people get evicted from the shelter, of course, and they vanish. And when this extraordinary woman's eviction came up from the shelter, it was this moment in which I thought, okay, do I follow her? Or do I stay in this situation and let her be another person who vanishes? And she had given me the privilege of such openness and such access to every minute of her life, her past, her feelings. It was such an incredible gift as a journalist and as a person. And she was such an extraordinary person to follow that I felt like I just needed to stay with her.
So it was initially a bit more of an ensemble piece. But it really did become just this sort of bullet train with Camilla.
BLAIR HODGES: You remind me of a quote that I just happen to see, I shared it on Instagram last night actually. [laughs] It's from James Baldwin. It says, "You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world. But then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever had been alive."
I think you're right, these stories…I mean, I don't know, I can't—I'll let James Baldwin's words stand for themselves! [laughs]
LAUREN SANDLER: I love that you read Baldwin, and you're like, “I think you're right.” Like, Oh, yeah. (laughs)
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, I'm not gonna restate Baldwin, he's Baldwin.
LAUREN SANDLER: Totally! What Baldwin said. That's what I meant.
BLAIR HODGES: Yes! [laughs]
LAUREN SANDLER: Usually, it is usually what Baldwin said. That's what I meant. [laughs]
Meeting Camilla - 12:05
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah! Yes! So you mentioned Camilla, she's the woman that becomes the focus of this book, what she liked when you first met her?
LAUREN SANDLER: When I first met Camilla—I mean, I'll never forget meeting Camilla. I wanted to report in a city shelter. So New York City has, you know, a huge number of shelters that house a huge number of people and are paid for with a huge number of tax dollars and are infamously mismanaged. And I think a bit of a tragic place, although we have in New York, a Right to Housing Law, which means that we actually do have these shelters. And if you can't fit into one, you will be put up in a hotel room somewhere until you can be. It's an unusual and very important law that happens to not have enough funding and management behind it to make it what it should be. That said, the city shelters do not permit journalists inside, which to me is a massive miscarriage of justice.
BLAIR HODGES: Let me say, I think the argument in the shelter would be they're protecting client’s privacy, right?
LAUREN SANDLER: Yes, but there are a lot of different arguments like that that get made. I mean, hospitals make those arguments. And then you can appeal to the head of the hospital and work through PR and get clearance. I mean, you know, factories have these rules. Pretty much any place that people can't just easily walk into where there are elements of risk or personal trauma, et cetera, in play.
BLAIR HODGES: Okay.
LAUREN SANDLER: Occasionally, journalists still get to go report on them. Not so with New York City homeless shelters. And so, you know, I think that if I was someone with more money and more time—funny how those things tend to go together—I would have sued the system to try to get in as a journalist, and then open up the precedent for more journalists to be able to enter, witness, et cetera.
BLAIR HODGES: Okay.
LAUREN SANDLER: But you know, I'm, I may have mentioned, I'm a freelance journalist and an author living in New York, [laughter] not exactly an abundance of either time or money.
BLAIR HODGES: Yes.
LAUREN SANDLER: So I found a private shelter in the neighborhood of Park Slope in Brooklyn that admitted women for one year when they were pregnant, or in their first month of motherhood. And they were either supposed to be in their last trimester, I should say, or in their first month of motherhood. And if they weren't kicked out, they could stay there for a year.
And I went and spoke to the woman who headed the shelter. And she said, “you know, honestly, I need someone to run this Wednesday night meeting, if you're willing to do that, sure, report, I don't care what you do.” And I said, “okay, well, this is a little tricky.” And she said, “okay, well, you'll work it out.” And I did. And sometimes you just have to work it out. And so I showed up—
BLAIR HODGES: And part of working that out was Camilla appears.
LAUREN SANDLER: Well, sure. But also part of working it out was showing up at that first meeting and saying, I'm here to lead this meeting, I am also writing a book. Anyone in this room, anything that you say is off the record, unless you tell me that you want to participate in this book. If you tell me that you want to participate in this book and then you change your mind, there's nothing about your story that I will use. There is no power here where something is going to happen to you at the shelter if you don't participate. I just want to witness this, and this is why.
And then I didn't take my notebook out for weeks. And, you know, gradually, a few people opted in. You know, there was someone who then decided at a certain point that she didn't want to participate anymore, and that was fine.
But Camilla was all in. Because Camilla was someone who I think really, really wanted to be seen and really believed herself, for good reason, to be exceptional in many ways, and I think wanted to be seen as exceptional.
So Camilla, you know, the first time that I saw Camilla at that meeting, she was like dressed out of a J. Crew catalog and you know, perfect makeup, incredibly pale skin, incredibly thin, perfectly curled hair, sitting with like a little Kate Spade bag on her lap. And she was just like the picture of this sort of beauty and poise that, you know, in a colorist society represents something significant in a society that expects women to present themselves in certain ways, especially if they are women of color and women in poverty, definitely presented something.
But that wasn't the thing that impressed me the most. The thing that impressed me the most was that she instantly started talking to the other women in the room about what all of their rights might be at a birthing center versus what their rights would be in a traditional hospital setting. Why doulas mattered. How they could start learning from this natural birth guru from back in the day who wrote a very, very famous book and I'm completely—I was such an epidural girl that I'm completely blanking on her name right now. [laughs]
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, that's my family too.
LAUREN SANDLER: I literally looked at the guy who gave me my epidural in the hospital and said I could kiss you right now [laughter]. I haven't felt this relaxed since I found out I was pregnant!
But you know, but that wasn't Camilla's experience. Camilla, really, she just wanted to investigate everything. And arm herself was so much information. And in fact, she was a criminal justice student, and she knew and understood the ins and outs of the social services system, the public education system, hospital rights, you name it, beyond anything I could have imagined. And she sat in that room, and she started talking to these other women. And I thought, who is this person? You know, why is she here? And how did she become who she is?
And you could feel all of them feeling the same way, sort of feeling like, on the one hand, who's this uppity girl lecturing us? And others sort of like in thrall of her charisma. And I just had this moment where I thought, I need to see how this person makes it out of the situation that she's in. Because if she can't, then who can?
And that was in my head through all the time I spent reporting this book. It's why the book is about her almost more than anything is that she isn't a case study. She's a very, very real person in a very, very broken country. But it did feel like if she can't make it work, I mean, what is this?
And, you know, there's a lot of suspense in this book, but I don't think it's too much of a spoiler alert to say that she can't. And that—that is, that is the true indictment of society that this book, I think, offers is that even this person who is a criminal justice student and has the most brilliantly legal mind I could imagine, who can do paperwork forward and backward, and carry dates and numbers and figures in her brain, and has documents in her backpack or in her diaper bag at every time—like, just completely equipped to manage the impossibility of poverty in this country, and of homelessness in this country, and of being a single mother with a baby, a Dominican American woman, you name it. I mean, it was piled on her. But it just felt like if this person can't end up in this situation, with a home, with stability, on her way to whatever is ambitious for her, then like, what is this place? How are we calling this a just society?
The shifting landscape of poverty in America - 12:05
BLAIR HODGES: That's Lauren Sandler. She's a journalist and author based in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in Time, the New York Times, Slate, and other places. She's also worked on a number of NPR programs like All Things Considered and Morning Edition. And we're talking about her book, This is All I Got: A New Mother’s Search for Home.
So if Camilla can't get out, who can? Take us to that beginning of the book, where, in chapter one, we're with you and Camilla, and pretty much nobody else in a delivery room and she's alone. What do you remember about that day when she has a baby?
LAUREN SANDLER: Blair, I wasn't in the delivery room. I love that you thought I was!
BLAIR HODGES: Oh, yeah!
LAUREN SANDLER: I was so careful. Oh, it's so—
So I love this. This was a really tricky thing in writing this book, as I wasn't always there in every single situation with her. But she would tell me things over and over and over, I would fact check them,. And I would just like need to sort of highlight the moments in which I wasn't in the room with “she told me” or something like that. Like it would just be a little wink at, I'm getting this information from Camilla.
But she was all alone in the delivery room. The person who she believed was the father of the baby, who she hoped was the father of the baby, was in Buffalo, New York and was going to come down once the baby was born. The person who we find out eventually was the father of the baby was nowhere to be found.
Camilla had some real tethers to her family. She has a mom, she has sisters, she has a dad. She knew her mom wasn't going to show up. She thought her dad probably wouldn't show up. She'd hoped that her sisters were going to show up. But no one shows up. And it's just her and the nurses and she has this great dynamic with these nurses which reminded me so much of my own delivery room experience with these incredible people who, if you've ever had a reason to be in a maternity ward my God, those nurses! But she just ends up alone.
A lot of the reporting I did I was there for, and a lot of the reporting that's in the book that I'm not there for she's texting me in real time. And some things—for all narrative books like this, you have to report it out and kind of fill it in, in retrospect. And so. So there we were.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, I should say, the quote here says, "It's hard for us to imagine that things could get worse than going into labor in a homeless shelter and giving birth utterly alone." So there it is. “But Camilla would look back upon this time in the hospital with nostalgia.”
So you're kind of setting the stage for us, giving us a little bit of background here about American social services, you know, things have changed over the years. And the fact that you're zooming in on one woman's story kind of lets you take a look at those bigger systemic changes, and how they actually impact individual people. So we meet Camilla's mother, who herself was a single mom in poverty. But she had, in some ways, more opportunities than Camilla had. She had an easier time than her. What are some examples of ways that things have actually gotten more difficult over the years?
LAUREN SANDLER: Ugh, you're right that she had an easier time and yet, and Blair, I have a hunch that you feel this way too, like, even that language feels like, how can we think about being poor in the nineties as easier than now when it's still like—
BLAIR HODGES: Sure.
LAUREN SANDLER: —when that was still the era of welfare reform and poverty was such a huge issue in the United States. And back then we felt like, how can this get any worse?
Yeah, I mean, it's reminding me of what you said about statistics, about homelessness, about COVID, et cetera, like the worst things get, the more you get inured to things. And it was just really bringing me back to that sort of Clinton-era moment of feeling crisis, and now thinking, right, but that crisis at least allowed Camilla's mother to pay for an apartment with a Section Eight check so that as long as the landlord was accepting that check, she could raise her kids in relative stability. They could have an apartment, they could stay in the same school district, they didn't have the same trauma and fear around that the level of housing instability that exists right now.
And, yeah, I mean, in addition to our housing market changing—which is obviously outside the social services system, but it is something that we choose not to regulate by policy—I think a lot about something that, in the early days of the pandemic, a guy who runs a homeless shelter in Seattle said on a Zoom with me. It was that moment when no one could buy hand sanitizer, and people were price gouging on the internet. He said, so people are going to be in uproar saying that we need legislation to limit the cost of hand sanitizer, but we're not doing that with housing. Like, what is this?
BLAIR HODGES: Mmhmm.
LAUREN SANDLER: So obviously, things changed on that side. But also, Section Eight dried up. Pretty much anyone who works in housing inequality can tell you that unless supportive housing—which is housing with, you know, a lot of mental health support and other services—is a real necessity, housing vouchers are the ways to keep people housed, to cut the cycle of generational poverty, to raise kids in stability. And even though that's pretty much a universal belief, with just legions of evidence behind it, we got rid of housing vouchers for the most part.
Public assistance is something that was developed to help white women if their husbands died so that they wouldn't have to go to work and they could raise their babies at home. And when our world shifted and it was more women of color who were applying for public assistance, then all of a sudden those checks started drying up and the whole thing was about, “you gotta work, work, work.” And there's like—I don't know, you probably know the statistics better than I from reading my book more recently [laughter], but you know, what a public assistance check (as like the most basic need coverage) has been deemed to be has gone from like 1,200 bucks a month to like 230 bucks a month.
BLAIR HODGES: While prices have actually increased.
LAUREN SANDLER: Completely, on everything!
BLAIR HODGES: So less money for more expensive things.
LAUREN SANDLER: You know, it's just, the center cannot hold. The entire, entire puzzle is broken.
Obstacles and the myth of America - 26:18
BLAIR HODGES: Part of the problem that you highlight, too, is that Camilla sort of bought into the “myth of America,” you call it, which is this idea that if you can get an education, then you can get a career, and you can get out of this cycle. And this was her plan, like this is how I'm going to get out of this.
But there were so many things that were stopping her from doing it. Give us a sense of some of those obstacles she faced. All she was trying to do was finish a degree get employed.
LAUREN SANDLER: Yeah, I mean, it’s basic things like, here she is a criminal justice student, amazing grades, incredible ambitions, she’s admitted into, to transfer into, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, which is a public university in New York, which also happens to be the greatest criminal justice school in our country. If she can find a stable place to live, she can go to that school. But she can't in part because her homeless shelter needs her to be working. Her public assistance needs her to be working, the people who she meets with the welfare office tell her, you should be picking up cans in the park, or you should be, you know, working in a restaurant, or you should be—you need to find some way to make money, whatever it is, as though this education is not for her, that working at McDonald's is what is for her.
And the people in that welfare office know that the people who do that work making minimum wage—which is unlivable—those people are also on public assistance. So are many teachers who work. I mean, this combination between the impossibility of wages and the impossibility of social services, and the impossibility of the housing market. I mean, it's just layer upon layer.
And then there's the fact that she's now a single mother of a baby. And, you know, what it takes to chase down child support, how much that child support actually costs. I mean, there just isn't a corner of this entire apparatus, there isn't a wall in this labyrinth that feels passable. And she really did—she had plans. Like, she had a plan. On the one hand, it's sort of the “myth of America” plan. On the other hand, it's like a very actionable plan, right? Stay in school, which is paid for, get stable housing, have work study on the side, figure out state-funded daycare, not expect to have much outside of that until you're earning a real wage doing real work, and, frankly, work for the public good. Yeah, that was her plan.
But I will say, in the shelter, whether the women who I knew were criminal justice students or hadn't gotten their GEDs yet, they also all believed in the myth of America. You know, there was a woman in the shelter who had incredible style, had a really great eye as a photographer, and she really believed like, “I'm going to be a fashion photographer, this is what I'm great at, this is my passion, I'm going to do this, and that's going to lift me out of this. I don't need to have a college degree to be brilliant at this. I'm just going to make this happen.” Because the world has raised her to believe you're an American, all you need are your dreams. If you work hard enough, if you dream hard enough—
And it's like, right, but that woman was born to a drug addicted woman of color. And we all know what the system says about who you're going to be if you're the daughter of a drug addicted woman of color probably, right? Like if your mom can't hold down a job, then you're going to be on the back end of every failure of our system, and you're going to grow up just having no stability, no power, no agency, no rock.
And there she was, and she left that homeless shelter to go into the New York City shelter system after being the most—according to the woman who ran the shelter—the most exemplary, driven, the person who got it all done in a way that wasn't necessarily rocking the boat at times like Camilla did, but just keeping her head down and you know, keeping her eyes on the stars, right?
And we just tell these stories, we tell these stories about how anyone, anyone can be Jeff Bezos, right? Except no, you can only be Jeff Bezos if you have a tax policy that allows you to be Jeff Bezos! [laughs]. I mean, just the whole machine. It's—I feel like I'm spiraling out talking about it a bit. But I just have to say that is part of why it was important to me to write a book length narrative work like this, because it is about the intersection of all of these issues. The story of poverty in America, for so many people, is about gender, as much as it's about race, as much as it's about education, as much as it's about housing, as much as it's about motherhood, as much as it's about psychological trauma.
And mainly, honestly, I think all of those things add up to what I think of as the inheritance game, where there's just this exponential law of diminishing returns. Which is, if you were born into poverty, then you are so much more likely to be stuck in even a greater poverty than your parents were. And if your parents were born into poverty, then you're already—you're one exponent beyond that already, and so on and so on.
BLAIR HODGES: In the book, we get to see how all of these things play out in visits to government buildings to get assistance, on subway rides, in care facilities for children, at school. I mean, she made the Dean's list, right? But you say, even when she was succeeding, and navigating all of these different places, you also say this was one of the lowest points for her when she supposedly succeeding at school.
Do you remember that particular part of the book where you're talking about—
LAUREN SANDLER: Oh, totally. And I'm like having this major sensory memory of standing with her in the corridor of Kingsborough Community College and seeing her name on the Dean's list. And having this moment—like the anticipation of looking for it, seeing her name there. And then watching her face fall, and knowing exactly what—you know, because I spent so much time with her, I knew her so well through this whole process—knowing exactly what that process was for her, was this pride, and then this devastation that she wasn't going to be able to share it with anyone. That, what was it going to add up to? That it was still like, I'm going to clock this success, and then I'm going to race back to daycare, which is on the other side of the city, and then I'm going to grab my kid and go to (now) my overcrowded apartment in the Bronx where I don't even know if I'm gonna be living here next week.
And this wasn't the plan. You know, it wasn't—it's never ever the plan. For anyone. It never should be the plan. For anyone.
BLAIR HODGES: It's such a difficult thing to witness through your eyes as you're seeing her. And we're seeing her just run around everywhere. It seems like she can't go anywhere without needing a piece of paper or like rescheduling a meeting or all of the—
Talk about all of the things she had to go through in the bureaucracy of poverty.
LAUREN SANDLER: Yeah, when people asked me, “what really surprised you while you were reporting,” I always feel like they're expecting me to say, “it really surprised me that homelessness is bad!” [laughter]
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
LAUREN SANDLER: Like, of course, you go into a book like this, knowing how bad things are, hopefully, and wanting to expose it.
But this was the thing I didn't know. I didn't know how totally bureaucratic and busted the whole system is. I didn't know that to get a check from the Public Assistance Office to pay your homeless shelter $200 for that month's shelter rent or whatever, you would have to go to the welfare office five different times and wait in the waiting room five different times over five different days, with your baby.
BLAIR HODGES: For hours.
LAUREN SANDLER: For hours ! For hours and hours and hours and hours just to be told to come back. Or that your case could be transferred to a totally different area and all your paperwork with it. But then you'd have to start over again.
It felt like it was literally a full-time job sitting in waiting rooms, waiting for people to tell her “that's the wrong piece of paper,” which it usually wasn't or, “oh, that paper's backdated from last month, we need you to now go find the other paper to make it work for this month. Oh, but your worker isn't here today. So we can't even give you the piece of paper that can get you that other piece of paper.”
And, you know, my sister-in-law works in social policy out in California. And I was sitting in her kitchen in the middle of reporting this book one morning, I was like just, I was so angry. And so beside myself. And I was just describing a day that I had just witnessed where we had gone from, I don't know, this one might have been child support office to child support office, it all blurs together into one, just, draconian nightmare. But I was describing all of this to Diana, my sister-in-law. And she pushed a book across the table at me that happened to be sitting on her kitchen table. And it was a book called Administrative Burden, which was written by two professors who research this sort of thing.
And the concept of administrative burden is that, you know, it is an actual burden to administrate all of this. The administrative elements of poverty are intentional. It keeps people from making the most out of what the system owes them. It keeps people stuck on a treadmill that they can't get out of. I mean, these are all things that are pretty easy to fix.
The myth of the welfare queen - 36:33
BLAIR HODGES: Well it seems like they're more concerned about not letting anybody rip the system off than they are with making sure the system is actually helping people.
LAUREN SANDLER: Yeah. And the notion that people are ripping the system off is almost entirely a fallacy. It's really hard to rip the system off. And if people do it, they're doing it for like, I don't know, a few hundred dollars every,—you know, maybe there are two people in a big population who get away with ripping off a few hundred dollars? Like—
BLAIR HODGES: I feel like someone would say, well, then it's working. That's what we want, rather than saying, you know what, it's actually worth maybe losing a little bit”—which again, still wouldn't be very common—to make it a better system to actually help the people that need it.
LAUREN SANDLER: Right. Though, I do think that the notion of people ripping off the system—and this is something that I write about in the book, and actually there is an entire book about exactly what I'm about to tell you, which is a really good read, which is The Myth of the Welfare Queen. You know, this thing that Ronald Reagan invented, where he had read one story about one woman in Chicago, right before a rally in his first campaign. And it was one of the most masterful, racist wolf whistles in campaigning history. And considering the decades we've just had to look back on that's saying something! [laughs]
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
LAUREN SANDLER: But he completely exaggerated one story of one woman in Chicago. And it made this trope, right, this trope of the welfare queen, the notion that people—especially women of color who were in the system—were taking people's tax dollars to buy furs and Cadillacs, and they didn't want to work, and your hard work and money was going to give them this life of luxury. And because of that, we have this intentionally broken system that is frankly costing us a fortune because it keeps people mired in poverty.
BLAIR HODGES: Just in case we don't want anybody getting, uhhh—
LAUREN SANDLER: Right.
BLAIR HODGES: —even though, [laughs] as you said, that’s not happening.
LAUREN SANDLER: So imagine what it would mean for our economy, as well as for, you know, just on the tax side of things, if instead of having people stuck on this hamster wheel, and living lives that are just—it's a lot of trauma, it's a lot of depression, it's a lot of hopelessness. And there's not a lot of reason to think that there is much of an end in sight. Joy is found outside of the opportunities that other people have.
Imagine if those opportunities were actually real. And we did have people like Camilla practicing criminal justice, instead of on public assistance. If we did have people like the fashion photographer I mentioned at the shelter, at least like in a situation where she could go to junior college and become someone who works in something adjacent to her field. Or, I don't know, work as a receptionist somewhere, and make a living wage, and then do fashion photography on the side.
Like, these things that, I think, people who are raised with a modicum of stability can imagine their lives and then make those lives happen in a certain way. We're talking about a massive population of people who imagine their lives just the same way, who have just the same skills, and just the same right to a life of meaning and self-actualization, and yet are just spending their lives in these waiting rooms. Spending their lives doing paperwork that feels like it's out of Kafka or Orwell. It's just—
It's mind boggling. And it's not accidental.
BLAIR HODGES: I'm glad you brought up that welfare queen story, because sometimes Camilla, as you're with her there, would be—she would get her nails done, for example.
LAUREN SANDLER: Mmhmm.
BLAIR HODGES: And so something nice, something, quote-unquote “frivolous,” right. And I think some people—I think a lot of people, would look at that and say, “well, you know, if she can afford to do that,” or you know, “look at her bag, or look at her shoes, then she should be able to do XYZ,” there's this judgment that happens. And I just wanted to hear a little bit more from you about that impulse.
LAUREN SANDLER: Oh Blair, I could talk about this for like a whole dinner party. So I'm going to try to try to keep it brief. We're also lucky that we're talking in the morning, so there's no wine in front of me, [laughter] because this is the thing that like leads me to the wine.
I did an event with a center at Harvard called the Joint Center, which it’s, you know, The Joint Center Between Housing Policy and the Kennedy School of Government. And we had this whole event around the book talking about housing policy, and the thing that a number of the professors who were on the panel with me wanted to keep coming back to was, "but she just kept getting her nails done!" And it felt like, you were the people who know how expensive housing is, Joint Center people! [laughs] You are the people who know how much this is a systemic crisis. Do you think that a ten dollar manicure every other week is going to get her a lease somewhere?
And it just felt like, the idea that people shouldn't have some agency, some pleasure, some dignity. I mean, we're talking about a 22-year-old woman who wants to feel confident who, you know—did I mention she's Dominican American? Do you know how important fingernails are in a certain subculture? I mean, I never cared about how my toenails looked ever until I started hanging out at this homeless shelter. [laughs] From then on, it was either closed-toe sandals, or I better get the buffer out.
I mean, we're talking about these small things that allow people to just—to be something other than defined by what they don't have, by the shame of their poverty. And I just thought it was really important.
It also, the nail salon was like, was a home in many ways for Camilla. It's the nail salon that was in the neighborhood where she grew up. She would take the train like really far from Park Slope, Brooklyn, all the way to Corona, Queens, which, you know, it's like an hour and a half to get there, so she could sit and gossip with the people who she had known ever since she was a kid. And just the price of that, I don't know. I just.
I think that when we start judging how people spend their nickels and dimes, when the real crisis is about issues in the thousands of dollars, we're just not—we're not paying attention to the right issues here. It's really easy to tell someone not to get their nails done. You can't just tell someone to sign a lease on an apartment they can't afford. So yeah, I mean, at first, that was something that I had to get over myself too, was like—
BLAIR HODGES: You call it “the shoulds,” like this impulsive, they should do this, they should do this.
LAUREN SANDLER: Yeah, yeah. And I think we all I think we all come loaded with those shoulds. I think we do it with anyone. People are judgmental. And I think for some good reasons at times, like you know, there are elements of moralism which can be important. I mean, I'm shoulding all over this conversation. But I'm like shoulding at our policy, I'm shoulding at our elected officials, I'm, you know, things should be different than this. I just think it's much easier to should at Camilla for getting her nails done than it is to should at a massive broken intractable system.
Navigating privilege - 44:09
BLAIR HODGES: That's Lauren Sandler, she's a journalist and author in Brooklyn. She's author of the book, This is All I Got: A New Mother’s Search for Home.
Alright, time to get a little bit more personal. I want to talk about the ethics behind the book. As a journalist, you're embedding yourself in certain ways. It reminds me of—it doesn't remind me of this, but I tie this into people who go out and live like a person who's homeless, out on the street for a night or something, right? And they think that this can teach them something about homelessness. So you're kind of embedded in this system. You're spending so much time with Camilla. But you're also going home. You have a home.
LAUREN SANDLER: Mmhm, mmhm.
BLAIR HODGES: What was that like?
LAUREN SANDLER: Yeah. I mean. My privilege is a real, real thing. I'm a white woman. I own my own home. You know, it's easy to see what I don't have at times, you know? I live in New York City, and I'm not married to a hedge fund manager. [laughter]
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
LAUREN SANDLER: I'm married to photographer, and we have to figure out how to make this life work for us. But we make a life work for us with a certain level of skin privilege and generational privilege. I have a happy healthy kid who—I remember leaving the shelter one day and going home and writing a check the minute I got home for my kid’s music lessons for a month and realizing that that was pretty much the same amount of money that Camilla had gotten for like public assistance that week. And, you know, I remember leaving the shelter and going to someone's house for dinner and stopping by to pick up cheese and, you know, a bottle of rosé on the way, and you know you just sort of—[sighs].
So it's—it's a hard place to navigate. Not saying like, “Omigod it's so hard for me to be privileged—”
BLAIR HODGES: Right.
LAUREN SANDLER: —but I think it is hard to wrap the mind around, because you know, on the one hand—Well, okay, like getting into the real ethical heart of this, like, yes, there's always class difference. There's always economic difference, et cetera. But in this situation, I also felt like unless Camilla was going to come and live with us—which is something I really write about and wrestle within the book—actually, I'll just tell the story.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.
LAUREN SANDLER: So, I think it was when she was getting evicted from the shelter. But honestly, her housing stability was hanging by a thread in every possible way through, you'll see, through the course of the whole book. And my kid had gotten really close with her and her baby, you know, I'm someone who, if you read the book, you'll see there are some real boundary issues that I have in general [laughs.] I'm not someone who says, “tell me everything about your life, I will tell you nothing about mine, I want to know your whole family, but you can't know mine.” Like, you know. I feel like you are sharing yourself, I'm going to share right back.
And so, you know, we do things. Like, we move her from house to house. Like we have holidays with her, you know? There's a real depth of relationship there. And then one day I'm talking about how I'm really really worried that she's going to end up on the street. And I'm scared about that. And how for me that was the line that—I didn't know if I could let her cross that line. But we weren't there yet. And the whole point of this book was to see how she could get herself out of this bind. To see if it was possible. It wasn't to save her; it was to see how she could save herself in a broken system.
BLAIR HODGES: It was to witness, right?
LAUREN SANDLER: Yeah, to witness, entirely. But you know, but my kid just could not believe that we weren't asking her to come stay with us. She could not believe it. And I think my kid was—how old at the time, maybe in third grade, and was saying to me, “what is this? This is someone you love. This is someone who we love. This is someone who you spend all your time with, you're telling me these horrible things? How are we not opening our home?”
And I write in the book, this is when I explained to my kid what a hypocrite is. And there is an inherent hypocrisy in this in some ways. In other ways, the point was to witness this so that nobody has to live like this. So that hearts and minds change. So that policy changes. So that we open up a different way of living.
And luckily we never got to the point where she was sleeping on a cardboard box. I think that would have been the line I had to cross. But I did set up ground rules from the beginning. I said listen, I'm not giving you money. Like, that's just—I will buy you presents and buy food when I am with you, like you know, you're never picking up lunch, I'm picking up lunch. And by the time like, I totally loved her so it was like, for your birthday we're totally going out. And I'm totally getting you those earrings and—you know, things that weren't gonna change her life, but just things that you do with people that you care about. But I said, you know, I'm not giving you any money, that isn't gonna happen. And she didn't ask for it. She never asked for it. She never challenged that.
And I told her, I think we need to have a real firewall between us on social media. She's—you know, like every twenty-two-year-old—social media obsessed whether, you know—I have yet to meet a homeless person who doesn't have a smartphone that at least hooks up to Wi-Fi somewhere if they don't have a phone plan. And I told her, it's really important that your identity is protected, and that you have the right for that, that you get to determine, not someone else, if you want this story to be owned under your own name. So I didn't want anyone to find her through social media.
And I told her, I feel like I need to draw a line at my house while we are reporting this, because I don't know how I'm going to keep it up otherwise. And I think it was the last one that hurt her the most. That she, you know, she didn't come over for dinner. Like she didn't do the things—I went over to her house for dinner, you know, like, she's a hell of a cook. And she knew that I was too. But I didn't cook for her in my own house. And that felt like a betrayal.
But these all felt like, okay, how do we manage this story without interrupting it—knowing that of course I'm changing everything by being there, I'm with her all the time, and yet allow it to have its fullest realization without my interruption?
It's a hard thing to navigate. You know, a lot of journalists do this by having really strong boundaries, like not talking about themselves, not introducing people to anyone in their family or their friends or whatever, you know? And we were at the place where Camilla was like, “so is John still in the friendzone?” about a friend of mine, you know? [laughter] Because, I don't know. We're just, we're people. I'm a person. She's a person. We're people with big hearts and big desires and big ambitions. Of course we were gonna connect and love each other, and care.
BLAIR HODGES: Do you have any regrets about how that played out?
LAUREN SANDLER: That's a really good question.
You know, Camilla did not want to read the book until it was published. I really, really wanted her to read it before. I wanted her to know what was in there so that, A) I could fact check it with her, B) She could determine if she felt endangered by anything that was in there.
You know, I just—I wanted her to protect herself. She knew what she was getting into talking to a journalist obviously. I mean, as we've discussed, like, it’s like being with an attorney all the time. But she never told me that anything was off the record. And I walked a very intentional line where, you know there's a ton of stuff that isn't in the book. When I teach nonfiction, I always say nonfiction is more what you leave out than what you leave in. You witness these endless moments, and which ones are you going to pick? And my strategy is always to figure out the clothesline of a project, what it means, what it's really about. This book was about the constellation of factors that keeps Camilla homeless. And if it didn't hang on that clothesline, no matter how juicy, suspenseful, meaningful it might be outside of that, it didn't go in the book. So there's a lot of stuff that I felt like I was able to protect her from just by that method, that mission.
But you know, it's hard to be written about. And she read the book and she had a hard time with it. And it wasn't my job to protect her. And I felt like there were things that I did to be as ethical as possible on that side of things. But, I don't know, that's the one thing that I regret, is not somehow getting her to read it before it went to press so that we could have really talked through it together.
BLAIR HODGES: Do you have any connection with her at this point? It's been, what, two, about a year and a half or two years since it came out?
LAUREN SANDLER: Yeah, I know. It came out in April of 2020. The week that deaths peaked in New York City. It was a hard time to have a book come out. That's another story. [laughs]
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, big party for that, yeah.
LAUREN SANDLER: Yeah, when they didn't know that Amazon was still going to carry books. They didn't know the printer in North Carolina would be considered an essential business. You know, it was like down to the wire. It was wild.
BLAIR HODGES: Wow.
LAUREN SANDLER: All this was happening while I had COVID, while my husband had COVID, while he's out covering COVID! I mean, whoa.
But you know, that said, you know, Camilla, and I have an agreement where we don't talk about her and her relationship with me from the time the curtain closes on the end of the book. And in fact there's an epilogue in the book that she—she felt like that even pushed what our agreement was. So I'm going to not say anything, even though you can probably tell that I'm dying to talk to you about it. [laughs]
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, but I think that's fair.
LAUREN SANDLER: No, I mean, it was, it’s such a privilege that she opened up her life to us this way.
BLAIR HODGES: You realize readers want to know it, right?
LAUREN SANDLER: I know.
BLAIR HODGES: Because you connect us with her, like, I felt so much for her.
But again, I think that should serve as a reminder to readers that this is a person, and this is a person that is worthy of dignity and respect, and all of the privacy at this point that she needs. She's already, by agreeing to be in your book, given us more than I think anyone should have had to give. So—
LAUREN SANDLER: Yeah. I think she thought it would feel different than it has.
BLAIR HODGES: Hm.
LAUREN SANDLER: And honestly, I mean, having written about people for twenty-something years now, I think everyone feels that way. I mean, I've been written about, you know? When I'm profiled, I always feel like, what?! [laughs]
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah! [laughs]
LAUREN SANDLER: Like, take it back!
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, that's fair.
LAUREN SANDLER: I mean, like, puff pieces feel bad to people. And this book is really exposing someone who is struggling and at her most vulnerable.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, you talk about her sexual life. You talk about her intellectual life. You talk about her religious life. There are so many intimate things in here that you really—that really clarified it for me when you said, yeah, when you've seen other people write about you, you're like, wait, what? Like, even when it's a good thing! You're just kind of like, okay, that's, that's a really interesting little “me in a box” there that seems very alien from who I feel like.
LAUREN SANDLER: Yeah, yeah, I know. I mean, you know, Janet Malcolm famously wrote The Journalist and The Murderer, which is sort of the tome on considering the relationship between someone who does what I do and someone whose, you know, whose name ends up in the book and it is a complicated relationship always. And it is one that I at least know I am actively wrestling with at all times. But yeah, it is not an easy dynamic.
So what can we do? - 55:58
BLAIR HODGES: All right. Well, I’ve got one more question before we hit the break. And it's that, when people find out you've written about this, if they're like me, they want answers about what I can do What can I do today? Like, what am I supposed to do? What do you say in response to that question?
LAUREN SANDLER: [inhale, exhale]
BLAIR HODGES: Because where do you start?
LAUREN SANDLER: Right, I mean, well, that is sort of the question. You know, this is a vast, vast, vast systemic problem. This is a problem where if you are Bezos or Zuckerberg or Gates or Musk, you can write a check for twenty billion dollars and everyone in the country will be housed. Like, there are—because of our situation as an economic structure in this country, there are individuals who can make a massive difference individually.
Also, because of that structure, many of us can't make a massive difference individually. But we can as a collective. So if you can find a shelter that needs support. If you can—I know this is like all so generic and old school—but if you can make this an issue that really matters to your elected officials and have them start really advocating. If you can agitate, if you can make sure that this is a human rights issue, and everyone knows it. If you talk about it, write about it, educate your families about it, make sure that it's something that people feel accountable for outside of their own experience.
Like, take everything that we learned about how to be anti-racist and, you know, this is just another version of that. That it's not enough to just like, shake your head or feel like you're not part of the problem. Like, this is the world that we live in. And we, to a certain extent, still have some power to create it.
And so, yeah, I mean, there are organizations in every single community that are trying to do everything they can in terms of services, outreach, policy change, and they're doing it on a shoestring. They're doing it screaming into a wind tunnel.
You know, I feel like we all know the things—our shoulds, like the things that we should be doing. And I know it's hard. I know there's not a lot of bandwidth, there's not a lot of money. You know, it's been a really challenging couple years. And we all felt like there wasn't enough before then.
But, you know, I would invite you to read this book, and to seek out anything else you can that can help you internalize the experience of this, so that it feels like more than just a should. So that it's more than just like, Oh God, what a horrible story in a world of horrible stories. Like, if you can invite this into your experience, you will probably find the places that you know in your community and in your world where you can go with this. There are a lot of places and they need you. And you know, just do a Google search. I have a website LaurenOSandler.com that has some resources for some of this on it. But you know, they tend to be pretty New York oriented or national. You know, I really recommend you thinking locally about who's doing the work and helping them do that work.
BLAIR HODGES: That's Lauren Sandler. She's the author of the book This is All I Got: A New Mother’s Search for Home, which I also want to mention was named a notable book of 2020 by the New York Times. She's also appeared in the New York Times, Slate, the Atlantic, she's worked with NPR on All Things Considered and Morning Edition.
And it's been so awesome, Lauren, to have you here today at Fireside. This is awesome.
LAUREN SANDLER: Blair, you are awesome. This podcast is awesome. And I'm just so excited to listen to what you're doing next.
BLAIR HODGES: Oh, good. Okay, we'll be right back after this for a Best Book recommendation. The fire is dying down. It's about to go out. So we'll get that book recommendation and everybody can go home! All right, we'll be right back.
[BREAK]
Best Books - 62:30
BLAIR HODGES: We're back with Lauren Sandler. And today on Fireside we talked about her book This is All I Got: A New Mother’s Search for Home. But we also like to talk about other books and other things to read or watch or listen to or whatever. This is your opportunity, Lauren, to tell us about a best book, or some kind of thing that you'd recommend. I'm gonna turn the mic over to you.
LAUREN SANDLER: You know, I was thinking about this question. Things like best books tend to really freeze me. I think in part I have like, endless fights with male friends of mine who are really into ranking best albums and best songs and best films and I—like, it's just not the way my brain works. And I think it has a lot to do with—I don't want to be gender essentialist but you know, I do think that when you were trained on baseball scores or if you've, you know, served in the military or—not that there are women who do all those things—but there's a way of organizing the world that is super gendered for a lot of people and my brain never went there. For me, this is like, choose your favorite children, which actually people can do. [laughs]
BLAIR HODGES: I'm not gonna say that I'm not—no comment. [laughter]
LAUREN SANDLER: This is why I have an only child. So it would be easy for me to answer that question. But, you know, it did get me thinking about the books I was thinking about when I was writing this book, which both feels like a flub and an opportunity.
So I wanted to talk for a moment about what, what led me to crafting this book as I did. You know, writing about poverty is not easy, to write it in terms of like, you know, how is it going to feel suspenseful? Because frankly, a lot of poverty is really boring, right? If you're in a shelter after curfew, how much happens? If you're on the subway, going from appointment to appointment in New York, you're just sitting for hours, you're sitting in waiting rooms for hours, like, you aren't given the freedom at times, if you are living the life that Camilla was living to, like, you know, it's not a car chase. And yet I knew that this is a book that needed to be a suspense narrative. And it also needed to be like—it needed to be closely observed. It needed to be modernist in some way. It needed to just, be just like a straight line out of the gate.
And so there were two books that really meant a lot to me before I started writing this book, and I kept coming back to as models of craft. And they are Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf.
BLAIR HODGES: I love that book.
LAUREN SANDLER: And The Road by Cormac McCarthy. [laughs]
BLAIR HODGES: I love that book!
LAUREN SANDLER: Two very, very different books, right? You know, a book about a woman in London who's planning a party and getting the flowers herself, right? And just sort of this day in the life, but it ends up being about so much more. Like where that level of close domestic observation brings in so much feeling, and so much texture, and so much grief about a very, very tangled world.
And then The Road by Cormac McCarthy is about this father and his kid in this dystopian post-apocalyptic landscape that are just literally walking down a road trying to survive. And it is massively suspenseful, minimalist. You know, I just felt like if I can achieve some element of what these two books are doing, and apply it to then the forms that writers like Alex Kotlowitz and Jonathan Kozol—You know, Alex Kotlowitz wrote a book called There Are No Children Here about a couple of boys in a housing project in Chicago, that when that book came out, it like changed my life, and really showed me what I wanted to do as a writer. And then you know, because even as an atheist, I can say, God is good some of the time. [laughter] It was Alex Kotlowitz who reviewed my book for the New York Times, and it was like, omigod, put me in a time machine and send me back to like being twenty-two years old and obsessed with There Are No Children Here and tell me that I'm going to write this book that will feel like this to me. And I can be proud of like this, and it will feel like this to him in the New York Times! But you know, Random Family is a book that I mentioned earlier, which I think is a real model of this.
But one thing I will say about these books of nonfiction, and frankly, all of the books that I just mentioned, they are all books by white people. And we do not have a great rich history of deep narrative nonfiction about social justice issues, written by people of color, in part because we live in a system that has a media culture and a publishing culture that has always been so white. And these have always been sort of the prize assignments, right? To get funded to do some immersion project. And the notion that, you know, it's some sort of poverty tourism, like, it's complicated.
And I really want to note that I want to see more nonfiction, and not just memoir, but reported nonfiction coming from different voices about these topics, and from people who are working in craft and not just in sort of like—in more of sort of a daily journalism, hard journalism way.
I mean, we know that there are people with extraordinary stories that they want to tell. We have a publishing culture that leans towards the personal. And I think that having more and more personal nonfiction memoir about these issues is really, really important.
But I also want to see other people from other backgrounds reporting out these stories. Because, you know, Camilla's story would have looked different to anyone who wasn't me. And I just, you know, I think it's really important that we are seeking out books that really mean things to us, that aren't necessarily what are getting the biggest marketing budgets, or the biggest sort of hoist up into the canon, or the bestseller lists.
Because—go to your bookstore, go to your local bookstore, ask the people who work there what has changed their hearts and minds, what has moved them, what makes them feel deeper or differently about something that they thought they really had a beat on before. Buy those books from your local bookstore, and then tell your friends to buy them. I mean, this is how the whole thing works. So.
BLAIR HODGES: You can also call your local library and ask them if they don't have it to buy it as well. Like, libraries can get it in stock.
LAUREN SANDLER: This is true. Yes, yes, absolutely.
BLAIR HODGES: This ties right into Kiese Laymon's episode, we talked to him just a couple episodes ago, and he's a Black writer who's doing that sort of memoir reportage. I mean, and we talked in the interview about how difficult the industry has been—
LAUREN SANDLER: Mmhmm.
BLAIR HODGES: —and how, in some ways it has conspired against fostering this type of authorship. And it's still happening.
LAUREN SANDLER: And it's always been whiter behind the curtain than it even is on my side of things.
And so you know, there are some real moves to make changes there. There have been significant changes in the past year, and that is a very, very good thing. But, you know, pull back that curtain when you can. Read stories about how the things you love are made. And if you wonder why other things aren't made, be curious about it. Because our world is very much made by people who make these choices. It's how we understand what the world is, and what matters, and how we're supposed to feel about it. And it was an extraordinary privilege to be able to write this book for Random House. And it is the work that I became a journalist to do. But I just, I’ve got to make sure that it's not just me, who is not just doing, you know, a personal story, but the ability to tell other people's stories, too.
BLAIR HODGES: And before we go, what's next for you? What are you working on?
LAUREN SANDLER: Well, my agent has my new book proposal right now. And so I'm like refreshing my email nervously all the time. [laughter] You know, no matter how many books I write, it never gets less anxiety-provoking somehow.
So I'm hoping that what my next book will be another work of narrative nonfiction that talks about something vast and systemic through a closely observed family story. But in this case, it is about a pastor who believes that he is prophetic, is an extreme right-winger, was on Trump's immigration committee and election committee, and who believes that we are in a civil war, and that people need to be stockpiling guns to fight the other side. “The other side,” he defines as anyone who has resisted the truth of Trump's reelection. And he has five children who were all raised within his church, and every one of those kids has become a leftist—
BLAIR HODGES: Wow.
LAUREN SANDLER: —artist or activist. So it's about looking at this incredibly divided family, this ideologically just, rendered family and—
BLAIR HODGES: Did you get to be pretty close with the family themselves? So they're actually—
LAUREN SANDLER: Yeah, they're down for it.
BLAIR HODGES: Okay. Wow.
LAUREN SANDLER: Yeah, so it will hopefully be a way of telling, you know, like a Southern family story—stories that I love, love, love—in that sort of closely observed American novel way, except it will be nonfiction and it will, I hope, speak very much to these times we find ourselves in.
BLAIR HODGES: Well that sounds excellent. Lauren, I want to say again, thanks for being here. This has been fantastic.
LAUREN SANDLER: Blair, talking to you is an absolute pleasure. Please invite me back or I might have to invite myself.
BLAIR HODGES: Okay! Thank you. [laughter]
Outro - 72:09
BLAIR HODGES: Fireside with Blair Hodges is sponsored by the Howard W. Hunter Foundation—supporters of the Mormon Studies program at Claremont Graduate University in California. It’s also supported by the Dialogue Foundation. A proud part of the Dialogue Podcast Network.
I hope you enjoyed this discussion today, thanks for being here at Fireside. This is a bring your own refreshments situation, but you're welcome to continue the conversation online. You can join me on Twitter and Instagram, I’m at @podfireside. And I’m on Facebook too. You can leave a comment at firesidepod.org. If you don’t know where to review the show, Apple Podcasts is the main place, but you can always just click on an episode on the website and scroll down past the transcript—a full written transcript of each episode, by the way—and you’ll see the comment section there. And as I mentioned earlier Spotify listeners can rate shows too, so you can do that there! You can also email me questions, comments, or suggestions to blair@firesidepod.org. That is the address.
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Fireside is recorded, produced, and edited by me, Blair Hodges, in Salt Lake City. Special thanks to my production assistant, Kate Davis who created the transcript. And also thanks to Christie Frandsen, Matthew Bowman, Caroline Kline, and Kristen Ullrich Hodges as usual.
Our theme music is by Faded Paper Figures. Thanks for joining me at Fireside with Blair Hodges. It's a place to fan the flames of our curiosity about life, faith, and culture together. See you next time.
[End]
NOTE: Transcripts have been lightly edited for readability.