Hand to Mouth

Tirado was working two jobs at IHOP and a fast food restaurant, raising two kids, when she posted an essay to an online forum answering the question of why poor people make decisions that look self-destructive from the outside. Why they smoke. Why they have children they can't afford. Why they eat junk food. Why they don't save money. Her answer — that all of these behaviors make complete sense from inside a life organized entirely around immediate survival with no slack, no cushion, and no future worth planning for — was read by over six million people and became this book. Barbara Ehrenreich, who wrote Nickel and Dimed from the outside as a journalist, wrote the foreword and called Tirado the real thing. The distinction matters: Ehrenreich documented the experience, Tirado lived it and had to keep living it while writing about it. The book is funny, furious, full of expletives, and completely uninterested in making poverty respectable or palatable or inspirational. It is interested in making it visible and in making its logic legible to people who have never had to think about why a cigarette during a double shift is a rational decision. The structural companion to Poverty, by America — Desmond names who is extracting the value, Tirado shows what it feels like to have it extracted.