Scraping by in the Big Eighties

by Natalia Rachel Singer

Natalia Singer's plan, when she headed for Seattle in 1979, was to get laid off, go on unemployment, and become laid back. Meanwhile she would train herself to become a writer. Rejecting the avid materialism of her generation and the violence of American culture, she vowed to surround herself with natural beauty, steer clear of her mentally ill mother, and contribute nothing to the fluorescent-lit, acronym-ridden, anesthetizing military-industrial complex. Her quest, which she hoped would bring her peace, safety, and creative fulfillment, actually put her increasingly in harm's way. It has, however, paid enormous dividends for readers who here have the perverse yet exquisite pleasure of following Singer's low-budget search for a bohemian haven during the last gasp of the cold war. Singer's tortuous path, chronicled with self-deprecating wit and disconcerting candor, leads her to a duplex in Seattle, a Buddhist monastery in the Catskills, a ghost town on the Olympic Peninsula, a beach hut in Mexico, graduate school in western Massachusetts, and even a Left Bank convent, but it never frees her from her identity and obligations as an American, either at home or abroad. Singer blends memoir with cultural history to critique Reaganomics, military buildups in the face of eroding social programs and growing national debt, the hypocrisy of so-called family values, and her own complicity in all of it. Scraping By in the Big Eighties is, more than anything, about taking politics personally. Lyrical, meditative, occasionally heartbreaking, and often darkly comic, this book about mistakes blithely made in decades past is nonetheless still timely today.

Genres: Nonfiction

225 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[Mira · Rating 5 out of 5]

READ THIS BOOK! My sister wrote it and it rocks!

[Bruce Grossman · Rating 4 out of 5]

A misery memoir in which personal misery is paralleled with the misery of eighties American foreign and domestic policy and sea change in the national worldview. Very credible because not too much remembrance of details, always very skeptical of details thirty, or even three, years after the fact, even here details may be poetic license (good for Mary Carr's "Liar's Club" that it came out before the "Million Little Pieces" scandal). Makes one ponder authenticity, and why such books are presented as non-fiction instead of romans-a-clef. Where's the advantage? But this book rang true enough to me.

[Jay]

I picked this up off the Half Priced Books clearance shelf, and my expectations were regrettably quite low. I should have had a little more faith though--this book is excellent.
I lived through the 'big eighties' but only as a child thus the macro lessons and zeitgeist didn't get absorbed much. I could easily pair this book with Sarah Schulman's 'My American History'--both books deftly detail how econopolitical machinations defrauded the country and how the rich rifled through the working class' pocket book--
that said, what's even more amazing about this book is how Singer does not hesitate to paint herself and her contemporaries in unflattering light. It takes the small details of her life and places them in the larger context, making both parts of each chapter richer.
I even like the epigraphs and use of 'books to separate years/eras--something I would probably find too twee in another book.

[Hanzi Deschermeier · Rating 5 out of 5]

My partner and I read this aloud as we we traveled across the country several years ago. Natalia's story, while both striking and beautifully recounted on its own, is elevated by her keen commentary of historical, political, and social issues that remain undoubtedly relevant.

Highly recommended for anyone born in (or touched by) the 80's.

[Cherie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Good memoir abt being poor, in love, and living in the Reagan 80s