Fans of American bestseller Maid by Stephanie Land should read Driven by Marcello Di Cintio
This interview originally aired on April 2, 2022.
When the memoir Maid by Stephanie Land was released in 2019, it immediately hit the bestseller lists and was critically praised. Former U.S. president Barack Obama even put it on his summer reading list.
Maid is Land's story of turning to housekeeping to make ends meet while she was a single mother and college student. She describes working in people's homes, becoming, as she says, a nameless ghost, observing her clients but invisible to them. The book was later adapted into a popular Netflix series of the same name starring mother-daughter actors Andie MacDowell and Margaret Qualley.
The Next Chapter columnist Victor Dwyer has read Maid and says if you enjoyed that memoir, you should check out the Canadian book Driven by Marcello Di Cintio, which was on the 2022 Canada Reads longlist.
Maid by Stephanie Land
"Maid is a story of the frustration and the imposed shame of depending on government programs to get by, especially in America with its horrible safety net. What I found most interesting in the book was Stephanie Land's unswerving look at the consequences of making certain life choices.
"She endured a lot of insults and injustices in her job, and how she was treated in other ways, because she was poor. But she doesn't entirely portray herself as a victim. Hers is a cautious tale about the consequences of bad life decisions.
What I found most interesting in the book was Stephanie Land's really unswerving look at the consequences of making certain life choices.
"But as you read this book, you realize for her, how much fear felt like grief — fear over little things like, 'Can I pay the electric bill?' Her fear over the side-eye you get when you use food stamps. It's also a grieving process for the life she she wanted to have, for the life she saw for herself before. This book's an indictment of systemic poverty."
LISTEN | Stephanie Land discusses her memoir Maid:
Driven by Marcello Di Cintio
"Marcello Di Cintio is a real traveller. In 2018, he decided to put away his passport and spend a year travelling across Canada. He wanted to stay at home, where there are lots of taxi drivers, but never stopped to ask a lot of questions. He thinks we've heard the stories of the drunks and the fare jumpers and the obnoxious couples getting a quickie in the backseat. He said he didn't want to talk about the backseat.
"If there's one thing the two books share, it's the story of hard-working, nose-to-the-grindstone people who also have to have a knack for toughing it out and persevering and problem-solving — whether it's to get by to survive or just to deal with people in life day-to-day.
I think they both tell a kind of story we don't hear a lot, which is a working-class, blue-collar story.
"It's gorgeous writing. He goes back and forth from his experience as a passenger to what these people have been through. Because such a high proportion of taxi drivers in Canada — especially in the larger cities — were born abroad, the stories he tells are often stories of the immigrant experience.
"I think both books tell a story we don't hear a lot, which is a working-class, blue-collar story. Even in society today, where we talk often about all kinds of groups who are vulnerable and who have been victimized by society, I often find the idea of class gets lost."
LISTEN | Marcello Di Cintio discusses the secret lives of taxi drivers:
