RAISED BY FERNS

Zeller looks back on her life, from an impoverished childhood to a tumultuous middle-class adulthood.

A reader from a young age, the author “dreamed of a literary life” and would become a poet, writer, and educator as an adult. Now living in a Spokane, Washington, homeowners association community in a home of her own with two children, an HOA president husband, and a tenure-track job, Zeller seems to have a charmed life—no one would ever guess she came from an impoverished background. Born in 1979 at a gas station owned by her parents on the Oregon coast, the author recounts her transient childhood, describing living in a van, squatting in mattress stores overnight, and gathering fish and berries by hand for meals. After saving funds from odd jobs and scholarships, Zeller attended college in the late 1990s, discovering that the childhood she saw as ordinary was a world away from those of the middle- and upper-class students around her. Despite these differences, the author found herself “passing” as middle class. (“I knew how to move between formal and informal language registers, so no one picked up on my past.”) The author also dissects the ways in which the American education system as a whole favors those from middle- and upper-class cohorts, pointing out that the SATs “privilege specific socioeconomic groups, races, and genders.” In poetic prose, Zeller describes a lifelong feeling of never quite fitting in—she discusses feeling like a traitor to her class for changing her social status while being made to feel as though her background made her inferior, particularly by her middle-class husband. Reflecting on the challenges she faced both in lower-class and middle-class contexts, Zeller compellingly interrogates the privileges she holds and lays bare how fickle those privileges can be.

A lyrical and heart-wrenching exploration of the fragility of privilege and the social systems that protect it.