Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Stephanie Land, author of Maid, published just this month by Hachette.

Stephanie HAS been a maid, a single parent, a free lance writer, and no offense a part of America’s underclass. And now she has written her memoir of her struggles and her overcoming of those struggles.

Stephanie’s work has appeared in the NYT, The New York Review of Books, the WP, The Guardian, Salon, The Nation and many other periodicals.

Maid is her first book. Maid deals with hard work, poverty, guilt, anguish and a larger picture about America today and an underclass, if you will, that flies under the radar of most Americans.

It also explores the emotional turmoil, in additional to the monetary one. This adds to the difficulty one suffers when they are the lowest rung on the system.

Maid explores self reliance, shame and the ability, if one has the strength and the fortitude to raise themselves by ones own bootstraps.

And this all occurs with the added burden of having to raise a child as a single Mom, which is hard enough for any Mom whatever their socio-economic stance.

Stephanie tells us, through her own life stories about these questions, and in many ways the answers that can be found.