Vance-chroniclers of life at the margins who ground their memories and experiences within the broader sociopolitical context of being a certain kind of broke in America. With her memoir, Jolie joins a small coterie of notable white working-class writers like Sarah Smarsh, Linda Tirado, Stephanie Land, Tara Westover, and (in a far more limited compass) J.D. There can never be enough written for and from the perspective of America’s working class, and lately we’ve seen an encouraging trickle of memoirs and essay collections from authors who are well acquainted with overdrawn bank accounts, precarious livelihoods, and empty stomachs.
I’ve been a voracious reader since childhood (shout out to the bookmobile that serviced my isolated community), and I’d always refused to accept that our stories weren’t worth telling, no matter what the rest of the world may have decided. And as is true for Jolie, this formative understanding of my own identity and place in the world stays with me decades after I left the woods and cleaned up my grammar, as if it’s something for which I-we-should feel shame. That feeling is as rare as hen’s teeth for those who grew up the way I did: broke and rural and steeped in the cultural and class signifiers that mark me as “blue collar” or a “redneck” in America’s sociocultural hierarchies. Save for some of the big details, it felt like Jolie’s story was my story, from her recollections of anarchist organizing projects and navigating the challenges of living with a severely disabled parent to her habit of using loud, aggressive music to cope, and her continual discomfort in “fancy” environments. Rather, the book summoned an instant and unexpected pang of recognition when I picked it up-the shock of finding a piece of myself greeting me in its pages. The memoir itself, which tells the story of Jolie’s youth and adolescence in one of Northeast Ohio’s dying industrial towns, isn’t overly weepy. So begins Rust Belt Femme, the new memoir from queer femme writer Raechel Anne Jolie, and quite possibly the first book that’s ever made me well up with tears within the first few pages. A PhD and multiple major-city addresses can never change that being poor is written in my blood and my bones as much as it is sung from my tight skirts and cheap lipstick. I’m what one therapist called a “ class-straddler,” which I prefer to “class-transitioner,” because the truth is, there’s never not a foot of mine planted firmly in Valley View, eating processed food, watching stolen cable, and going to stock car races.
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