In my own family, the low-wage way of life had never been many degrees of separation away it was close enough, in any case, to make me treasure the gloriously autonomous, if not always well-paid, writing life. I felt sorry for the parents who had paid college tuition for these blue-collar wannabes and sorry, too, for the people they intended to uplift. The last time anyone had urged me to forsake my normal life for a run-of-the-mill low-paid job had been in the seventies, when dozens, perhaps hundreds, of sixties radicals started going into the factories to “proletarianize” themselves and organize the working class in the process. But Lapham got this crazy-looking half smile on his face and ended life as I knew it, for long stretches at least, with the single word “You.” How does anyone live on the wages available to the unskilled? How, in particular, we wondered, were the roughly four million women about to be booted into the labor market by welfare reform going to make it on $6 or $7 an hour? Then I said something that I have since had many opportunities to regret: “Someone ought to do the old-fashioned kind of journalism-you know, go out there and try it for themselves.” I meant someone much younger than myself, some hungry neophyte journalist with time on her hands. I had the salmon and field greens, I think, and was pitching him some ideas having to do with pop culture when the conversation drifted to one of my more familiar themes-poverty. Lewis Lapham, the editor of Harper’s, had taken me out for a $30 lunch at some understated French country-style place to discuss future articles I might write for his magazine. The idea that led to this book arose in comparatively sumptuous circumstances.
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