Sign-In
Cart
The Privilege to Feel: Essays on Resilience and Other Myths
Audio Book
Biographies GeneralPoverty & Social Work
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: Mar 16 2027
Language: English
From Stephanie Land, critically acclaimed author of bestselling memoirs Maid and Class, a series of autobiographical essays based on the bureaucratic forms that shaped her life. An exploration of the trauma of poverty and finding hope in the face of an American system increasingly devoid of compassion.
People struggling to make ends meet are governed by forms that request information in flat, declarative language. Vehicle make and model. Previous hospitalizations. They have no space for what the answers actually hold. Asking if the applicant is pregnant doesn't ask how many times they've tried or how scared they are to hope. The reasons for the hospitalizations. The night a teenager's first car was totaled. The years it took to recover from each of them.
In her third book, Stephanie Land offers a collection of essays, using those emotionless, bureaucratic prompts to tell the stories behind them. Written from the other side of recognition and a public reckoning with poverty, these essays move through a high school car accident and its decades-long aftermath: a hospitalization for a diagnosis left untreated, and insurmountable medical bills that resulted in bankruptcy. As she serves coffee by day while chasing dreams of being a college student and a writer, she asks: Who gets to be tended to? Who gets a gentle hand on the shoulder in an emergency room? Who gets a teacher who believes in them? Who gets to hurt, grieve, fall apart, be angry, and be cared for with dignity and without being processed? Forms dictate which aspects of her life can be checked off in a box and reduced to data. The essays insist on telling the stories that can't.
The Privilege to Feel is a book about what survives the paperwork, and about the harder, more expensive work of finally letting yourself admit you need something after spending a lifetime being told you don't deserve to.
Also from
Land, Stephanie
Class: A Memoir of Motherhood, Hunger, and Higher Education (Large Print Edition)
Land, Stephanie
Hardcover
Also in
Biographies General
Bluesland: Portraits of Thirteen Major American Blues Masters
Pete Welding (ED.)
Toby Byron (ED.)
Hardcover
Karl Popper - The Formative Years, 1902 1945: Politics and Philosophy in Interwar Vienna
Hacohen, Malachi Haim
Hardcover
Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man
Trump, Mary L.
Hardcover
The Children of Athena: Greek Intellectuals in the Age of Rome: 150 Bc0-400 AD
Freeman, Charles
Hardcover
Make It a Double: From Wretched to Wondrous: Tales of One Woman's Lifelong Discovery of Whisky
Sackier, Shelley
Hardcover
The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race
Isaacson, Walter
Hardcover
Agents of Chaos: Thomas King Forçade, High Times, and the Paranoid End of the 1970s
Howe, Sean
Hardcover
An Enemy Such as This: Larry Casuse and the Fight for Native Liberation in One Family on Two Continents Over Three Centuries
Correia, David
Hardcover
Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
Cooper, Christian
Hardcover
Florence Kelley and the Nation's Work: The Rise of Womens Political Culture, 1830-1900
Sklar, Kathryn Kish
Paperback
The Secret Life of the Savoy: Glamour and Intrigue at the World's Most Famous Hotel
Williams, Olivia
Paperback
The Devil's Diary: Alfred Rosenberg and the Stolen Secrets of the Third Reich
Wittman, Robert K.
Kinney, David
Paperback
The Badger: The Life of Bernard Hinault and the Legacy of French Cycling
Fotheringham, William
Paperback
Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything
Ehrenreich, Barbara
Paperback
The Butcher, the Embezzler, and the Fall Guy: A Family Memoir of Scandal and Greed in the Meat Industry
Cherington, Gretchen
Paperback
My Own Devices: True Stories from the Road on Music, Science, and Senseless Love
Dessa Wander
Hardcover
Nobody's Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice
Giuffre, Virginia Roberts
Hardcover
How to Be Okay When Nothing Is Okay: Tips and Tricks That Kept Me Alive, Happy, and Creative in Spite of Myself
Lawson, Jenny
Hardcover
A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon
Fedarko, Kevin
Paperback
Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground
Dohrn, Zayd Ayers
Hardcover
Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast
Colloff, Pamela
Hardcover