Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

by Jessica Bruder

For the first time the Jeep is towing Linda’s home: a tiny, pale yellow trailer she calls “the Squeeze Inn.” (If visitors don’t get the name on first mention, she puts it in a sentence—“Yeah, there’s room, squeeze in!”—and smiles, revealing deep laugh lines.) The trailer is a molded fiberglass relic, a Hunter Compact II, built in 1974 and originally advertised as a “crowning achievement in travel for fun” that would “follow like a kitten on the open road, track like a tiger when the going gets rough.” Four decades along, the Squeeze Inn feels like a charmingly retro life-support capsule: a box with rounded edges and sloped sides, geometrically reminiscent of the Styrofoam clamshell containers once used at hamburger joints.