"An Angle of Vision," edited by Lorraine M. Lopez

I have written before, both on this blog and in my academic publications, of my interest in issues of social class. “An Angle of Vision: Women Writers on Their Poor and Working-Class Roots” (University of Michigan Press, 2009), edited by Lorraine M. Lopez, is a fascinating collection of essays. It speaks to my interest in women’s lives, writers’ lives, and social class issues as they are lived out by real people. The authors of these memoiristic essays are very generous in sharing their experiences and feelings, even when doing so is obviously very painful for them. As several of them remark, even though they know intellectually that it shouldn’t be so, they have often felt shame and secrecy about their class backgrounds and the poverty that many of them lived through. Now these women are established as writers and often as academics, but they never forget the legacy of their pasts. A common issue too is that many of them feel torn between two worlds: by virtue of their education and increasingly middle class lives now, they feel there are barriers between them and their families and past lives, yet they still don’t feel they truly “belong” in their current academic and writing lives, in their middle class lives. They often feel that in both situations they are just barely “passing,” and are imposters in both worlds. Some of these stories of childhood (especially), family, college years, and early careers are wrenching, even heartbreaking. Although reading these essays saddened and in some cases shocked me, I was grateful to the writers for allowing us readers these windows into their lives, and into the reality of the lives of so many in the United States, lives that are often forgotten, as the media and other venues prefer to present the façade that most Americans are middle-class and at least reasonably comfortable.