Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

by Jessica Bruder

Linda went to clear out a storage unit she’d been renting for four years in the Phoenix suburbs. (“I would like to just throw a match in there, I think,” she’d reflected earlier.) She loaded a moving truck with the contents and went to a friend’s five-acre property in New River, Arizona. She set aside mementos—a kindergarten watercolor of a catlike creature from her grandson Julian, a birthday card from her younger daughter Valerie with a pinup girl in a cactus bikini. “You’re still looking sharp!” it quipped. But everything else—the old record player, the matching glass lamps with tufted shades, the piles of cookware—had to go. She held yard sales. After deducting the cost of trucking everything to New River, her take for the first weekend was $99.75. “I will never rent a storage unit again,” Linda vowed. Not long after, she wrote to me, sharing a quote she’d seen online and found poetic: “Inevitably bouts with obstacles offer discouragement as you cut every tether holding you from freedom.”