Stephanie Land’s best-selling debut memoir MAID: HARD WORK, LOW PAY, AND A MOTHER’S WILL TO SURVIVE was the latest offering in the Ballenger Eminent Person Lecture Series, for seven decades Michigan’s longest continuously-running #1 speaker series.
Last week (Aug. 31) at Mott Community College’s new Lenore Croudy Family Life Center, Land recounted her harrowing saga as a single mom navigating the poverty trap. Her unflinching and inspiring testimony exposes the physical, economic, and social brutality that domestic workers face, while radiating a parent’s hope and resilience.
Land was just the latest in a long line of distinguished Ballenger speakers, which most recently have included former Polish Prime Minster Lech Walesa, filmmaker Spike Lee, civil rights activist Harry Belafonte, and singer/songwriter Patti Smith. Earlier, there were rocket scientist Wernher Von Braun, newscaster Peter Jennings, conservative icon William F. Buckley and scores of others.
Here are some of dozens of testimonials about Land’s best-seller, which inspired the upcoming Netflix offering:
“The particulars of Land’s struggle are sobering, but it’s the impression of precariousness that is most memorable.”
―The New Yorker
MAID inspired the new Netflix Original Series, starting October 1, which stars Andie MacDowell, Margaret Qualley, and Billie Burke.
Here’s Netflix’s latest update::
- ‘Maid’: Billy Burke Joins Cast Of Netflix Series (Deadline)
- ‘Maid’: Tracy Vilar Joins Cast Of Netflix Series (Deadline)
- Andie MacDowell To Star Opposite Margaret Qualley In Netflix Series ‘Maid’ (Deadline)
- Margaret Qualley To Headline Netflix’s Dramedy Series ‘Maid’ Produced By John Wells & Margot Robbie (Deadline)
- Netflix Orders Female-Driven Dramedy Series ‘Maid’ Produced By John Wells & Margot Robbie’s LuckyChap (Deadline)
MAID is also being published in several foreign languages with print editions available now, or in the coming months, in countries around the world. Here are a few of the reviews on this book:
More Rave Reviews
“A single mother’s personal, unflinching look at America’s class divide, a description of the tightrope many families walk just to get by, and a reminder of the dignity of all work.”
—Former President Barack Obama, “Obama’s 2019 Summer Reading List”
“Maid isn’t about how hard work can save you but about how false that idea is. It’s one woman’s story of inching out of the dirt and how the middle class turns a blind eye to the poverty lurking just a few rungs below — and it’s one worth reading.”
―Washington Post
“For readers who believe individuals living below the poverty line are lazy and/or intellectually challenged, this memoir is a stark, necessary corrective…. An important memoir that should be required reading for anyone who has never struggled with poverty.”
―Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“Stephanie Land strips class divisions bare in her phenomenal memoir Maid, providing a profoundly important expose on the economy of being a single mother in America. This is the warrior cry from the tired, the poor, the huddled masses, reminding us to change our lives and remember how to see each other. Standing ovation. Not since Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed has the working woman’s real life been so honestly illuminated.”
—Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Book of Joan
“What this book does well is illuminate the struggles of poverty and single-motherhood, the unrelenting frustration of having no safety net, the ways in which our society is systemically designed to keep impoverished people mired in poverty, the indignity of poverty by way of unmovable bureaucracy, and people’s lousy attitudes toward poor people… Land’s prose is vivid and engaging… [A] tightly-focused, well-written memoir… an incredibly worthwhile read.”
─Roxane Gay, New York Times bestselling author of Bad Feminist and Hunger: A Memoir
“Marry the evocative first person narrative of Educated with the kind of social criticism seen in Nickel and Dimed and you’ll get a sense of the remarkable book you hold in your hands. In Maid, Stephanie Land, a gifted storyteller with an eye for details you’ll never forget, exposes what it’s like to exist in America as a single mother, working herself sick cleaning our dirty toilets, one missed paycheck away from destitution. It’s a perspective we seldom see represented firsthand-and one we so desperately need right now. Timely, urgent, and unforgettable, this is memoir at its very best.”
─Susannah Cahalan, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness
“A work full of integrity and of the grit, graft and grace that comes with it. Stephanie Land’s memoir is an essential manual in the sort of resilience, hope and diligence many of us will be fortunate enough to never experience. Maid comes from the gut not the gutter. Stephanie Land was meant to be a writer.”
─Lisa Blower, award-winning author of Sitting Ducks
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