Squeezed : Why Our Families Can't Afford America
Author(s): Alissa Quart
One of TIME’s Best New Books to Read This Summer
“Brilliant—a keen, elegantly written, and scorching account of the American family today. Through vivid stories, sharp analysis and wit, Quart anatomizes the middle class’s fall while also offering solutions and hope.”
— Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed
Families today are squeezed on every side—from high childcare costs and harsh employment policies to workplaces without paid family leave or even dependable and regular working hours. Many realize that attaining the standard of living their parents managed has become impossible.
Alissa Quart, executive editor of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, examines the lives of many middle-class Americans who can now barely afford to raise children. Through gripping firsthand storytelling, Quart shows how our country has failed its families. Her subjects—from professors to lawyers to caregivers to nurses—have been wrung out by a system that doesn’t support them, and enriches only a tiny elite.
Interlacing her own experience with close-up reporting on families that are just getting by, Quart reveals parenthood itself to be financially overwhelming, except for the wealthiest. She offers real solutions to these problems, including outlining necessary policy shifts, as well as detailing the DIY tactics some families are already putting into motion, and argues for the cultural reevaluation of parenthood and caregiving.
Written in the spirit of Barbara Ehrenreich and Jennifer Senior, Squeezed is an eye-opening page-turner. Powerfully argued, deeply reported, and ultimately hopeful, it casts a bright, clarifying light on families struggling to thrive in an economy that holds too few options. It will make readers think differently about their lives and those of their neighbors.
Review(s):
“The issue is overwhelmingly structural and social, not individual or moral. We haven’t failed; Capitalism has failed us. As Quart reminds her reader—and as every story in the book is meant to illustrate—the economic bind we find ourselves in cannot be solved by personal discipline or better financial decisions.”
“Quart is a sympathetic listener, getting people to reveal not just the tenuousness of their economic situations but also the turbulence of their emotional lives... We could all use her expert guidance through the maze.”
“An eye-opening look at the forces that make it harder than ever for the middle class to survive.”
“Squeezed captures well the toxic combination of American individualism and the disrupted evolution of particular professions that has left millions of millennials in a more fragile financial condition than they expected would be their lot in life.”
“It’s not often that you can call a densely reported work of literary non-fiction about economic inequality a riveting page-turner, but Squeezed is just that.”
“In a nation beset by income inequality and riven by conflict, the conception of the quiet contentment of middle-class American life appears to be on the wane. . . . Alissa Quart . . . lucidly demonstrates that for many, the dream of such satisfaction is increasingly out of reach.”
“The stories of a falling down middle class reflect a felt experience of anxiety that is often lost in data-driven tales of recession and recovery.”
“On the day that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez accomplished her remarkable victory in the Democratic primary . . . a new book arrived, as if by cosmic fiat, to help explain the emerging realignments of the political order: Squeezed.”
“Squeezed captures the dazed uncertainty of a post-recession generation of would-be parents for whom stagnant wages and ever-rising housing costs make them can’t-be ones...Quart [has] a knack for immersive, in-depth reporting, as well as an often-bruised sense of unlikely optimism.”
“Think of Alissa Quart’s new book . . . as “What to Expect When You’re Expecting Under Late Capitalism.” Of the more than 50,000 books listed on Amazon under ‘Parenting,’ few engage as deeply with the economic pressures today’s parents must navigate.”
ISBN: 9780062412263