A sobering look at what growing up in poverty is like, and how it affects the decisions made. Not exactly the most upbeat thing to read, but it is insightful and worth reading.

“I don't know exactly when I gave up on America. I only know that it was long after America gave up on me. There are
many stories of America, but this story is one we don't hear so often. It's the version of ourselves we don't like to think
about, the one where poor people can't always pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, where not every smart kid makes it out of the ghetto. The one where the American Dream is a lie. How do I tell it? How do I tell it so you will understand? Not for sympathy, just so you will understand what it has done to us, growing up poor.”

The book of essays goes back and forth between the author’s life experiences and the problems in America specifically things like health care, student debt, and racism.

I found the discussions on the intersection of race and class, the myth of American exceptionalism, and the treatment of poor people in America really interesting. It reminded me how poor white people have been made into an “other” and deemed “not white” similarly to the Irish in the early 1900s. I learned a lot from this book and related to some aspects of it particularly the discussions on student loans and the difficulty it causes for people to work their way out of debt.

At one point, Livermore sort of suggests that we divide the US and let states break away if they don’t agree with the majority (ie states like Alabama and Missouri in regards to supporting Trump and being pro life). However I feel like this idea does a dangerous job of ignoring the fact that not everyone in those states feel the same way and would then be trapped. We can’t just abandon people and let them suffer in order for the majority democrat states to “thrive.”

The essays are heartbreaking and enraging, I highlighted a lot of quotes (a couple of my favorites I’ve shared below). The book could be slow and difficult to read at times but overall a moving, insightful read about the author’s life and the inequality in America. Ms. Livermore thank you for sharing this vulnerable side of herself and hopefully helping more people see where change is needed..

•

“We idolize wealth in America; it is our national pastime and our religion
Wealth is good, so under our ideology, the wealthy are good We want them to like us, to accept us, because we want to
be like them.”

“When I think of America now, I feel something like the hiraeth I feel when thinking of where I grew up. But I've stopped looking for my America. The thought of that breaks my heart, but then again, I'm American. My heart was broken long ago.”

TW/CW: racism, classism, child neglect, drug abuse, addiction, alcoholism, violence, mental illness (specifically bipolar disorder), sexual harassment, fire injury, death, infidelity

We Are Not Okay
Elegy for a Broken America
by Christian Livermore
Pub Date 01 Oct 2022
Indie Blu(e) Publishing, Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA), Members' Titles
Biographies & Memoirs | Nonfiction (Adult)



I am reviewing a copy of We Are Not Okay, Elegy for a Broken America through Indie Blu(e) publishing and Netgalley:


I wanted to love this book, but I didn’t though there were good parts to this one I struggled to get through it. But she did bring up some good points, including how America often treats its poor, and the lifetime of consequences poverty often brings.



Christian Livermore grew up a shy little girl in a turbulent family sunk in poverty, violence, substance abuse and mental illness. She ate government cheese, suffered from malnutrition and struggled to defend her body against threats both outside the house and within it. And even though she made it out, she has suffered a lifetime of consequences since: excruciating health problems, fear and shame. Especially shame. In We Are Not Okay, Livermore's deeply personal and moving essays explore what it means to grow up poor in America and ask whether it is possible to outrun the shame it grinds into your bones.


I give We Are Not Okay three out of five stars

Happy Reading!

I am not even sure how to start this. It's that good.
The social contruct of class and race is all over the place in this nonfiction novel that brings you in from the first page and by the time you realize it you are about half way done with the book.

It speaks to the idea of being poor, of being in different places in the world and how people treat you. It speaks about parents who do not help you, and if they do, it definitely is not adequate. The author speaks of a time in which hard work does not pay off and all you recieve is more suffering until you leave the whole construct that is being poor and trying to live your best life.

I have never read anything like this, but if the author were to come out with another book, I know that I would grab it just because their name is written on the cover. The book is engrossing and it helps the reader understand what they the author went through in order to get where they are in life. If the reader is unfamiliar with the idea of living poor, then this is something that will enlighten them. For me growing up lower middle class, we were so close to this on a daily basis, living paycheck to paycheck, so I can relate to the ideal that the author is presenting.

With certainity I can say, we are deifintely not okay, the United States as it is right now, is definitely not okay.

The title alone is enough to catch anyone's attention. "We are not okay" are words that resonate across the world, with anyone who's been alive for the past ten years -- or the last three, for that matter. I'm not the first to tell you, Reader, that we are still struggling through a pandemic, an era of shrinking wages and increasing inflation, inadequate housing, dismal health care, sweltering/deluging/freezing climate change, and the list goes on and on and on... And has been accruing for... well, since human society began. And that's part of Livermore's point: We have not been okay for awhile and this is an intergenerational problem, an unescapable inheritance that will just keep paying it forward over and over -- though, hopefully, with less interest for each successive cohort.

The teetering house on the stark cover of Livermore's book is home for many of us. If I had a house, it might have been my own. This is We Are Not Okay's appeal: it is a book that sends a familiar vibration in all of us (except the wealthy 5%), "us" meaning the lower, working, striving-to-be-middle-class end gamers. I think Livermore (and I) are accurate in our assumption that there are more of us in this category, more of "us" than we want to admit to. It's taken me decades to shrug off my mother's middle class aspirations and acknowledge that we've balanced on that razor edge for generations, a paycheck, a job, a single recession, a whiff of luck and one good friend away from being not okay.

Here is where Livermore shows their metal: it's not where we are now, but where we've come from that marks us. Poverty is that malingering virus that begets a comorbidity of chronic dysfunctions so banal as to be classified as "life" or "age." (Health is one of the key points Livermore brings up, health and unhealth those of the lower and lower-working classes just assume to be a part of living.)

I am writing this on my Mac Air, which I bought new (with a justified educator discount) and I have a great job -- and like Livermore, I have a degree that I thought made me... well, to be frank, classy. Now, in some ways -- and Livermore doesn't raise this point much -- my degree has elevated my status in some ways. I can command a kind of respect in some circles, not so much in others. (My brother asked me in my last year of graduate school, "What're you going to do with that degree? You must really like school, you keep going back." What he didn't say was, "For the love of biscuits, WHY?" I replied, "Yeah, I'm not going to make much money, but it's important to me." And it is. It really is. But, I digress.)

Livermore's point is: Poverty is not a number, it is not something you can grow out of or improve, except in that small incremental way, like a credit score -- but not really within one's lifetime, but through generations. Three points up in one generation. Twelve points down the next. Because someone lost a job, had a mental breakdown, fell into alcoholism... Three points up in a month. Twelve points down in this lifetime. Because I paid off my car. Poverty is not something Livermore, I, or anyone can erase with a piece of paper that confers... the title "Doctor" and a student loan. But we can learn the appropriate disguises, find the a mask that hides our origins enough. I can pump up my credit score enough to get that car loan, I can.

This is a form of code switching.

But here is where Livermore and I part ways a little. Code switching for me and for many other Americans is embedded in a racial history. Livermore is white, their experiences are also white. This is not to say Livermore is raceless; no one is without race. But there were elements of Livermore's story I couldn't fully reconcile. It is here that Livermore schools me (though it's a lesson I've learnt before, it is one worth repeating): White code switching is class-passing. Race and class are inextricably intertwined, it's true. Racial code switching for whites pulls from the intangible domain of "class."

Class of course is a tricky category, meaning so many things, some tangible like income and the size and type of your house, others intangible like the way you hold your fork. I see it in my students (of all colors and races and ethnicities) who don't ask for help in class or anywhere because they're used to not getting any, used to being beaten down, used to being denied. Class is about getting access to things and services and attention. Whiteness is about much the same, but not all whites have class. And the way in which Livermore presents that is brilliant.

Livermore's prose is authentic, the highest praise I can imagine for a memoir. It is brutal in parts and funny and sad and emotional. It is detached in other parts. It is cold and harsh. It performs the emotions and conflicts Livermore is bringing to the forefront. This swiveling, this code switching is a key characteristic of poor people. It is self hate, it is selfishness as self care. It is as convoluted as humanity because poverty is a wholly human construction built on the development of hierarchical society, that is: civilization.

Livermore's We Are Not Okay follows in the vein of Tara Westover's Educated: A Memoir in that it explores the embodied cultural legacies of poverty. However, Livermore's book differs from Westover's in that it is more relatable. First, Westover's book is grounded in a specific religious community, society, and history. Livermore's background is more ordinary and bland, therein, more relatable. Livermore might be anyone's neighbor, anyone's school mate, anyone's professor. I wonder now how much or how little do I know about my colleagues, my professors. Do I see their whiteness and assume a privilege that isn't really there? Livermore's We Are Not Okay is one to linger with any reader. I will think of it when the Fall semester begins again, as I look into my sea of students, throw back summer stories with my faculty peers. Second, and perhaps more poignantly, Livermore's We Are Not Okay does not come to a natural closure as Educated: A Memoir does. I will not spoil the ending; you'll have to read it. Let's just say Livermore's memoir is... realistic. It is not that Westover's is not, but if you've read Educated: A Memoir it does come to an organic closure. Livermore leaves us in that teetering house, pondering our own fate... This is part of the lingering of this book, a sensation that makes this worth reading.

Livermore delivers. This is a book that will stick with you. It may even dig into your bones where poverty may have been leaching away at your marrow for longer than you know.