Linda Tirado

The real-life Nickel and Dimed--the author of the wildly popular -Poverty Thoughts- essay tells what it's like to be working poor in America. ONE OF THE FIVE MOST IMPORTANT BOOKS OF THE YEAR--Esquire -DEVASTATINGLY SMART AND FUNNY. I am the author of Nickel and Dimed, which tells the story of my own brief attempt, as a semi-undercover journalist, to survive on low-wage retail and service jobs. TIRADO IS THE REAL THING.---Barbara Ehrenreich, from the Foreword As the haves and have-nots grow more separate and unequal in America, the working poor don't get heard from much. Now they have a voice--and it's forthright, funny, and just a little bit furious. Here, Linda Tirado tells what it's like, day after day, to work, eat, shop, raise kids, and keep a roof over your head without enough money. She also answers questions often asked about those who live on or near minimum wage: Why don't they get better jobs? Why don't they make better choices? Why do they smoke cigarettes and have ugly lawns? Why don't they borrow from their parents? Enlightening and entertaining, Hand to Mouth opens up a new and much-needed dialogue between the people who just don't have it and the people who just don't get it.

Linda Tirado knows from experience what it is to be poor, to struggle to make ends meet. She was working two jobs - as a food-service worker in a chain restaurant and a voting rights activist at a non-profit organisation - and has two children and a husband who struggled to readjust to civilian life after his last tour in Iraq. She knows what it's like to have problems you wish you could fix, but no money, energy or resources to fix them, and no hope of getting any. In 2013, an essay on the everyday realities of poverty that Tirado wrote and posted online was read and shared around the world. In 'Hand to Mouth', she gives a searing, witty, compassionate and clear-eyed insider account of being poor in the world's richest nation.

An urgent, uncompromising and heartfelt insider's account of what it is like to be poor and working-class in the modern West