The Three Best Books about Work I've Read

Studs Terkel's oral histories are treasure troves. (The zombie novel, World War Z is actually an homage to Turkel's WWII history, The Good War.) His book Working (which was made into a musical), is a tapestry woven from many voices--celebrating the working woman and man in all their diversity. There is pride in work here--from the construction worker who likes looking at a skyline and seeing what he has helped build--but there is also despair and anger. But most of all there is a sense that work gives meaning to a life. The book was published in 1974 and in the 40-some years since, some of the jobs chronicled have ceased to exist. Writers, especially, should dip into this book--the characters are real, and fascinating, and original.

Barbara Ehrenreich is a writer with a feminist slant who has written on subjects as diverse as God and sex workers. When she set out to investigate the idea that a job--any job--could be the key to a better life, she went undercover to see just how that might work. The answer was--not very well. Her book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, is an eye-opener that anyone who has voted against a minimum wage needs to read. Ehrenreich's prose is graceful, and the book never descends into ranting, though there is passion here. She had an idea that all was not as rosy as it appeared on the surface, but some of what she found (particularly insie a "cleaning service job") shocked her. It will shock the reader too.

The latest book I'm recommending is Diane Mulcahy's The Gig Economy, which has a totally different focus. Yes, it talks about how work has transformed from a linear career to a series of "gigs" strung together by workers, but Mulcahy's focus is on how making this new reality work for a worker.  It's not just fast food workers and Uber drivers, she points out. As an adjunct professor, she's also part of the gig economy, moving from position to position in what one reviewer called, "an empowering search for freedom." As someone who has been a full-time freelancer for more than 20 years, and someone who has had to
hustle for gigs on Craigslist at times, I can vouch for the freedom, but also for the uncertainty. Mulcahy's book has some great strategies and tips for finding more and better work and also some pep alks about defining and refining goals. Well worth the read.

Feminist Fiction Friday--Miss Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty won the Pulitzer Prize for her 1973 novel, The Optimist's Daughter. Ten years after her death and almost 40 years after it was published, you can buy a digital copy of The Optimist's Daughter with one click. I hope she'd be pleased. She was a woman ahead of her times in so many ways, I'd like to think she would have embraced the ebook revolution.
The Optimist's Daughter was my introduction to the writer. My mother was reading it at the same time her father's long and painful final illness was coming to an end, and she found it almost unbearable to read.
I didn't have the same personal, viscderal connection to the material, so my reading was an entirely different experience.
It's not a novel with a lot of plot but her characters...her characters were so real and rich and right, that I knew her work was going to set the bar for me in my first fumbling attempts at writing my own stories.
Miss Welty (and such was the force of her personality, that even her most ferocious fans felt self-conscious about first-naming her) began, as so many novelists do, writing short stories.
Two of those stories, "Death of a Traveling Salesman" and "Why I Live at the P.O." should be required reading for anyone who wants to practice short fiction.
Shortly after I moved to Los Angeles, The Robber Bridegroom came to the city on its way to Broadway.  An adaptation of Miss Welty's novella of the same name, a romantic fable based on real-life stories of robbers who used to ply their trade along the Natchez Trace. (Miss Welty was from Mississippi.), it was a musical with book by Alfred Uhry (Driving Miss Daisy) and music by Robert Waldman.
I saw the play five times, which probably had more to do with my appreciation of Barry Bostwick, who played the title role, than my love for Southern literature, but the play was charming. (And if you know Bostwick only as the bombastic mayor in Spin City or as Brad in Rocky Horror Picture Show, here's a clip of him performing "Fathers and Sons"  in the Studs Terkel musical Working.)