What’s So Bad About Being Poor?

Foster recounts her upbringing in an impoverished family, and how “mental illness lurked darkly in [their] lives.”

During the author’s childhood in the 1970s and ’80s, her father, John, struggled with schizoaffective disorder, and her mother, Laura, had bipolar disorder that was initially improperly treated. Despite their similarities—both were conservative, fundamentalist members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—they were among the “most ill-advised couplings imaginable,” asserts the author. As a consequence, Foster says, her family lived “on the edges of society”: their home was a “dangerous wreck,” her meals were astonishingly lacking in nutritional value, and, at one point, the local Department of Social Services temporarily took custody of her and her siblings. Also, Foster suffered sexual abuse at the hands of predators, developed an eating disorder, and contended with “lifelong issues around abandonment,” she says. In this often harrowing but ultimately inspiring memoir, the author tells of finding consolation in books and academic achievement: “Reading was an excellent escape, and I was beginning to need to escape more and more”; she would eventually earn a joint doctorate in social work and psychology from the University of Michigan. Her heartbreaking portrayal of poverty is at the heart of this remembrance, and especially the perpetual insecurity it generated. Foster considers herself a “poverty expert in [her] own right,” and she contentiously takes aim at the writings of Charles Murray on the subject; however, he does not argue, in the essay he wrote that gives this book its title, that there’s “something inherently wrong” with the poor, as the author asserts, nor does he argue for denying resources to perpetuate poverty. Also, she makes the unsubstantiated claim that most Americans grow up within “an evangelical-authoritarian hierarchy” that’s essentially white supremacist. However, she ably reveals the extreme hardship of poverty and the extraordinary challenges of mental illness over the course of this work.

An eye-opening remembrance, hampered somewhat by uneven execution.