Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

by Jessica Bruder

AS LINDA GOT ACCUSTOMED to Hanna Flat, I observed her first two-and-a-half weeks there. We sat together for hours in her trailer at night. She doled out her life story in installments. The oldest of three siblings, Linda had adored her parents despite their shortcomings. Her father drank heavily, working on and off as a machinist in the San Diego shipyards, while her mother fought chronic depression. They bounced between apartments, moving seven times in a single year, and at one point left California for a stint staying with family in the Black Hills of South Dakota. On the drive east, Linda squeezed into a truck with her parents and two brothers, plus all their belongings and a dachshund named Peter Jones Perry. Linda’s mother had to get some teeth pulled around the same time. “My father couldn’t afford to put dentures in her mouth,” she recalled. “So here we are in this big flatbed with all the furniture in the back, my mother with no teeth, three kids, some damn dog.” Over time Linda’s father developed an increasingly violent temper. Sometimes at the dinner table he whacked her youngest brother over the head with a serving spoon. He beat Linda’s mother, threw her down the stairs, and “tossed her around like a ragdoll.” During one of the fights, Linda, who was about seven, hid in the back corner of the top bunk in her bedroom. There she made herself a promise: This is never going to happen to me. Meanwhile Linda struggled with dyslexia, though no one knew it. When her r...