My Candor Writing About Wealth Comes With A Price

How Adelle Waldman’s new novel Help Wanted is a Rorschach test for me about wealth and modern American capitalism

In writing my personal essays, I haven’t disguised the fact that I grew up in wealth and have remained wealthy. I aim to be authentic so my essays have to stay true to their actual setting and reflect my actual lived experiences. Otherwise, what’s the point?

But writing transparently about a sensitive issue like wealth invites criticism from readers and leads to a great deal of self-questioning. Particularly at a time when economic inequality is more pronounced and more blatant.

The more I write and think analytically about my own good fortune, the more I question why I deserve the extent of my privilege. It’s an obvious question for a self-aware, wealthy person to ask themselves. But it seldom gets asked in a serious way for fear that the honest, deeply considered answer is “no, I’ don’t deserve all this.” It’s an uncomfortable question, and I’m grappling with it.

I wrote a January post called Raising Children of Privilege in response to a reader’s question: “at what point does privilege lead to the isolationism from the difficulties most people face?”

In that post, I described what it was like for my wife and me to raise our children in the Manhattan private school world and the choices we made. I wasn’t looking for approval nor did I find it in one reader’s recent comment:

“As long as you’re sheltered from food insecurity, have healthcare, and do not live in fear, you are isolated from the realities faced by a majority of those living in the United States.”

That’s true. I can’t know what it’s like to live with economic precarity. Or what it’s like to live without economic abundance.

This commenter went on to refer to me as more “Father is Clueless” than “Father Knows Best.” (For the record, the commenter wasn’t one of my children.)

While this criticism was stark, I’ve received other comments that have led me to question the extent of my cluelessness.

In a comment to my post last week about a marital fight,

Louisa Wah

wondered what it would be like to be in a marriage where scarcity of money wasn’t an issue and where household and childcare chores could be outsourced as desired.

Louisa wasn’t issuing a rebuke; she was curious. But my own sensitivity to the topic put me in a confessional state of mind.

I replied to Louisa that being truthful about my life will sometimes reveal that I do take many privileges for granted. And that can be a bad look.

I know what it’s like, however, when I hear a wealthy person say something that makes me cringe, and I do my best not to be that person.

But cringe is a risk, and everyone who writes publicly about their life has to decide how much they choose to reveal in the interests of authenticity. ¹

One common way to balance writing from a position of privilege is to describe some scandal or gross defect in your upbringing, often combined with a fall to unenviable circumstances. An addiction, an illness, a family rupture. These authentic stories work because they’re interesting and they elicit compassion tinged with a sense of how-the-mighty-have-fallen schadenfreude.

I have no such story to offer nor do I wish for one. I have yet to uncover a sufficiently dramatic arc necessary for a successful memoir. [Note to editor: strike above from memoir pitch.]  

Help Wanted

At the same time as I’ve been mulling how to be authentic without coming across as a spoiled brat, I was devouring Adelle Waldman’s new novel Help Wanted, which on one level was a Rorschach test of my guilt about what American capitalism has provided to me vs. what it has done for those who have been left behind.

Waldman worked for six months in a Target store warehouse on the 4 am to 8 am shift. The employees on this short shift were nicknamed the “roaches” because Waldman and her fellow workers scattered away at 8 am when their shift ended, the customers arrived, and the lights came on.

Waldman used her work experience to create a fictional work world of a big box store that seemed to get the details right about the lives of the warehouse workers. Their ups and downs and the resulting battle inside their minds between hope and despair. We follow them doing their job restocking the store––the task of removing large boxes of products from inside a truck at the warehouse bay and then breaking the shipping boxes down into successively smaller units until individual items are placed neatly on the store’s shelves.

One of my favorite characters is the memorable Milo, the “thrower,” responsible for tossing the boxes down from the truck. Milo chooses the sequence of the boxes he throws down to create what Waldman calls a form of “performance art.”  

“A small box filled with two ounce tubes of Astroglide personal lube…followed by a long procession of diapers…This was a concise morality play about the outsized, years-long consequences of one small mistake.”

What surprised me the most about Help Wanted is Waldman’s portrayal of the workers’ attitude. These workers are denied the quantity of work hours they want (so the store can avoid triggering benefit requirements), receive low pay for backbreaking labor, and suffer constant affronts to their dignity.  Yet they are loyal to the store and take great pride in working as a team to restock the store successfully within their allotted time

As I read the novel, I put myself in the characters’ place and, at first, I felt only resentment on their behalf. But they make the best of their tough work situation. They often manage to derive what everyone craves from their work––satisfaction. ²

A novel may contain the same information as another form of writing––a non-fiction book, an article or an opinion piece. But a novel like Help Wanted transports us to another world, and that gives it the power and magic to convey that information so it resonates and lasts in our memory.

Waldman’s novel also delivers something rare––a look at how a particular business really works and the pressures and incentives of its employees from warehouse “roach” to store manager. ³

Solutions

Many people who read Help Wanted will be angry at the corporate overlords who dictate the conditions of the workers. They may conclude that businesses need to go back to caring as much for their communities and their workers as they do for their shareholders.

I don’t see that happening, and I don’t think that’s the right solution because it cuts against the demands of a hyper-competitive marketplace. It also cuts against human nature, which is to be guided primarily by self-interest.

Consider this question. If legislation were passed that required healthcare and other benefits be given to employees regardless of hours worked, would that be a great boon to lowly paid workers or a great boon to manufacturers of automated equipment that could replace those workers?

In Help Wanted, self-interest dominates at all levels. For example, the savviest executive from the head office recognizes great talent in an executive. She knows that if he ever gets lured away from the retail industry by Wall Street or Private Equity, he will likely become extremely wealthy–––seven, perhaps eight, figure income wealthy.

So to lock him in place, she tells the loyal executive that he’s on a fast track to be promoted to positions within the retailer that will eventually pay him a few multiples of the very low six figures he’s earning now. He’s delighted. He doesn’t realize his true earnings potential.

Parents and children

Parents earning $20,000 a year love and harbor hopes for their children just as much as parents earning ten or one hundred times as much. The difference is that insufficient resources of time and money thwart their hopes. More than anything it was the likely fate of the workers’ children in Help Wanted that bit at my conscience.

And it’s not capitalism to blame, but our political policies.

We live in the richest country in the world and spend a paltry amount on support for families. The countries other than America that make up the G-7––Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the U.K.––spend an average of 2.1% of their GDP on family benefits. The U.S. spends 0.7%. ⁴

That gap is a political choice, one I feel ashamed of. Because between those sterile numbers of 0.7% and 2.1% lies a multitude of human misery, sadness, and the doom of parental hope.

Comments: No specific question; I’m just eager to hear reactions.

1. Two of the writers I admire most on Substack,

<Mary L. Tabor>

and

Eleanor Anstruther

, created a joint series to answer questions about writing, Last week they gave generous answers to my question of how far to take transparency in memoirs and personal essays.

Here’s Mary Tabor’s post and Eleanor Anstruthers’ post. They have the same joint video response and then each has their own additional written thoughts.

2. For more on Adelle Waldman, Help Wanted, and her experience working at Target, see this New York magazine article. Link to the book is here.

3. If the business of America is business, then business is underrepresented in fiction. Some of my favorite novels describe in detail how businesses operate and what roles different workers take on. As examples, I’m thinking of Phillip Roth’s description of the glove manufacturing business in American Pastoral or Fitzgerald’s partially completed description of 1930s Hollywood in The Last Tycoon.

4. Based on data from the Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation (OECD).

Kirsten Powers

wrote a recent post about Denmark’s success as a capitalist country with a much more robust social safety net and higher taxes. I wasn’t surprised to learn that Denmark spends 3.3% of its GDP on family support.

Final card of the Rorschach test