Given how much Sarah reveals about herself and her parents in her new book of essays, Sunshine State, it’s a wonder she has anything left to warn them about. But that book has already gotten such great buzz — a front-page review in the New York Times daily arts section, a starred notice from Publishers Weekly, an impressive roster of author blurbs — that I imagine what they’re mostly feeling is pride.
Sarah Gerard first broke out on the national literary scene in 2015 with Binary Star, a jaggedly poetic debut novel about a couple locked in a mutual spiral of self-destruction that won rave reviews from the New York Times and Vanity Fair and was named a finalist for the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Award. We first got to know her at CL in 2010, when she wrote for us on subjects ranging from standup comedy to homelessness. She was also involved in starting up an ambitious but short-lived literary journal at The Studio@620.
What I saw then still obtains: Slight, soft-spoken, she beams with a keen intelligence that comes through clearly in her writing. What I didn’t know at the time was that she was in her third year of recovery from the consequences of anorexia and other addictions that had led to a near-death accident she would describe this way in the New York Times’s ‘Anxiety’ column in 2012:
“In September 2007, at the age of 22, I jumped from a moving freight train and landed on my face.”
That essay got the attention of an agent, who asked if she was working on a memoir. She wasn’t at the time; she had moved to NY for the New School grad program in fiction, working at indie bookstore McNally Jackson Books and submitting to hip periodicals like Bomb, where she began working after grad school. But the suggestion gave her the impetus to begin writing one, which morphed from memoir into Binary Star.
“There’s a very thin membrane between fiction and non-fiction,” says Gerard, 31. Like the novel’s college-aged protagonist, she was an anorexic, bulimic student teacher with an abusive, self-medicating boyfriend. Now, with Sunshine State, she is expressly writing non-fiction — but in embracing a wide range of subject matter and styles, she creates not only a candid portrait of herself and her family, but unearths bigger truths about the lure and the hardships of life in Florida and the world.
In some essays, she deftly weaves together chapters from her family’s history with wider historical narratives. “Mother-Father-God” is as broad as the title suggests. The account of her mother’s abusive first marriage, and her subsequent leadership in fighting domestic violence, leads to a wider discussion of the begrudging attention given to victims by law enforcement. Telling the story of her parents’ involvement in (and later estrangement from) the Unity-Clearwater Church, Gerard goes (perhaps a little too deeply) into the history of the denomination, itself a breakaway from Christian Science. In the essay “Going Diamond,” she brilliantly pairs the saga of her family’s temporary seduction by the shiny dreams of Amway when she was a child with vignettes from a tour of model homes in Bayou Club and Feather Sound, where she and a friend posed as prospective buyers while secretly taping the Realtors’ rose-colored sales pitches.
Some essays, like her chapters on the quixotic Ralph Heath of the Seacoast Sunbird Sanctuary and the homeless advocate G.W. Rolle, aka “The Mayor of Williams Park,” are strong, deeply researched journalism, distinguished by Gerard’s empathy for the subjects. Rolle’s chapter in particular is both a clear-eyed record of St. Petersburg’s attempts to remedy homelessness and a vivid portrait of a larger-than-life character.
What unites many of the people she writes about — Heath, Rolle, the drug-using, streetwise kids she hangs out with in high school, even her mother and father — is that they’re seekers, believing in something better, bigger than themselves. That applies to Gerard, too. There’s a gorgeous passage in “Mother-Father-God” when, as an 8-year-old, she’s looking up at the night sky from the back seat of her mother’s green Oldsmobile Delta and realizes her own idea of God — “knowing, for the first time, that we were made of the same material as all of it.”
That spirituality, and with it a deep respect for the natural world, suffuses the book. In the final essay, “Before: An Inventory,” she backtracks to childhood on the occasion of her 30th birthday by using animals as markers — from “Botanic Garden bees in the roses” to “Chipmunks in my grandma’s geraniums.” Echoed in the book’s cover art — a montage of Florida fauna (blue heron, jellyfish, turtle) — it’s an apt perspective for a writer tackling a state that’s both immersed in and at odds with nature.
Gerard’s desire to test her own limits manifested itself in adolescent adventures — like ruining her parents’ vacuum cleaner trying to clean up the puke after a wild high school graduation party and breaking into the Largo Central Park restrooms after hours — which she recounts in the book in hilariously deadpan manner. But her restlessness also led her to more dangerous explorations, and they’re part of the book, too.
She’s now living in the Ditmas Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, and met me for lunch at Buya Ramen in St. Petersburg in January during a short visit home to see her parents. As disarmingly straightforward as ever, she tells me that she has recently broken up with her husband of five and a half years, a filmmaker, but that no one is to blame. And when I mention that I’d heard that her mother was worried the book might lead readers to assume Sarah had had terrible parents, she’s quick to defend them, saying they can't be held responsible for her anorexia, for her self-destructive behavior, for her acting out. They encouraged her to be curious, they trusted her to be honest — and if she took advantage of that, how are they to blame? Having surfaced from her early life’s dark episodes, there’s wisdom in her gray eyes, and a hard-won, realistic optimism.
In the last piece, the more sort of freeform piece, there’s a couple of references to infants. You don’t have children…
No, I had an abortion in 2014 — an unwanted arrival. I don’t care if anybody knows that — especially in today’s world, it’s not something to be ashamed of. I think [my husband] feels the same way, and my parents know, and his parents know… He and I had really wanted to have kids together someday, but that wasn’t the right time. I don’t feel any remorse, but I wish that it happened at a different time.
What are you working on currently?
I’m about 15,000 words into my next novel — it begins in Florida, then moves elsewhere — and I write a monthly column for an online magazine called Hazlitt published by an arm of Penguin Random House. It’s about my monthly relationship with food, as somebody almost 10 years into recovery from anorexia and bulimia. That’s why I moved back to Florida after Hofstra [where she did her undergrad work] to go to eating disorder rehab…
That was after the faceplant off the train.
That was right before the faceplant. I got out of rehab in April or May of 2007 and then in July I face-planted off a freight train. I was running away from the boyfriend I was with at the time, a terrible person — he struggled with mental illness and was on a lot of medication that he wouldn’t take regularly, and then he was drinking heavily, emotionally and somewhat physically abusive. We had agreed that when I got out of rehab I’d move with him to Chicago and get married… but when I got out of rehab I basically had by then decided it was a matter of life or death that I escape this person. Within two weeks [I was] on a freight train.. with a cousin of my best friend. He was a recovering IV drug user, and he basically said, “I want to run away from life, too,” so I said, “OK, let’s go together” — so we did. And when we were traveling we became a couple, kind of through necessity.
As one does when one’s a hobo.
Exactly. Like, “Well, you’re my road dog, might as well have sex with you.” So then the accident happened. [“We waited for the train to slow down, but didn’t wait long enough,” is how she succinctly puts it in the Times essay.] It solidified our bonds, we ended up moving in together — and the rest is history. Then I stayed in St Petersburg for three years and got my life together and part of that was writing for you guys.
I found your essay in the Times archives and I was interested to see a comment essentially blaming your parents. People leaping to conclusions about your family that aren’t accurate — you risk that when you write so candidly.
I have to be honest about the life that I’ve lived. I made a lot of choices that weren’t wise, but that’s not my parents’ fault. I’m a free agent in the world. They always taught me to be independent, to pursue my interests whatever they were, and if they were dangerous, they never told me not to do something, but they would say, “Well, here are the risks involved if you choose to do this.” The flip side of that is that I wouldn’t tell them everything I was doing
Who does tell their parents?
Why would you? And I was a very curious and artistic child, an only child — encouraged to entertain myself. I taught myself to write and draw and sing. I would play outside by myself and with kids in the hood. My parents weren’t helicopter parents at all. I think that’s actually kind of a dangerous trend. A parent should not be involved in every aspect of her child’s life. I think now I feel very capable of taking care of myself because I had to learn to do that, because somebody hasn’t stepped in at every turn and told me something’s wrong. But no, it’s not my parents’ fault that I was with this drug addict or anorexic. Once I reached adulthood, what could they have done to stop me? And in high school, I mean I went to PCCA [the arts magnet school at St. Petersburg’s Gibbs H.S.], where you know there are lots of strange people attending PCCA. And I’m kind of a natural thrill-seeker.
The seeking part seems to be a theme from your parents on down. You start with them seeking [religious] enlightenment, then to Amway which in itself is kind of a religion, but a lot more egregious. It was striking to me because I know your mother primarily as the courageous mayor of Largo who stood up against the forces that wanted to discriminate against Steve Stanton — Susan Stanton now — and it was hard to reconcile this person with everything she’s been through. There’s a kind of survivor’s instinct which seems to have been bred in you, I think.
Hearing her stories as I was growing up, they were very formative to me. I always knew about Bob [the abusive first husband], for example. I’ve always looked up to her as a kind of wonder woman who could survive anything. I don’t know, maybe that kind of gave me permission to take more risks myself. I kind of always thought I would survive — and so far I have.
Structurally, your book is written in so many different styles. How did you decide the mix?
I needed to take a different path each time [depending on] what the subjects required. It allowed me to say what I wanted to say in each piece. I mean, my goals shifted as I was writing each of the pieces, as I came to discover my interest. For example, with the essay about Amway, I had originally wanted to write about residential development in Tampa Bay and how it’s changing the landscape — like, the area where the Bayou Club is used to be marshland. But I realized my interest was in my personal experience of Bayou Club — how Amway shaped my ideas of what a home should be and what success is. That is why I wanted to learn about residential development — not only because of how it has changed the landscape, but about how our reasons for developing an area change a landscape, how we want to live, how our dreams come into play. And because I had a personal story. My style as a writer is always very personal — I have a really hard time being objective in my writing, because I’m the one writing.
I wasn’t sure what it meant in the beginning of "Going Diamond" when you said that sections were fictionalized.
My “husband” [in the essay] is a friend of mine who agreed to go and pose as my husband. By fictionalizing this section I wanted to place emphasis on the act of constructing a dream…
And dream houses are constructed fictions.
Yeah, exactly. And fictionalizing the section gave me permission to intermix the tours. Those were actual quotes from people on the tours. All the dialogue is real.
That’s not their real names, though.
The names are not real.
But they may recognize themselves in these stories.
Perhaps. I had hidden a recording device in my purse, so I couldn’t always understand what they were saying, so some of the conversations are combined. But each of the houses is described very accurately. The dimensions are real, the locations are real — you could probably find the houses if you really wanted to.
The houses all seemed vaguely disappointing.
And being in Amway, too, you go in with these huge expectations — and then you realize there are all of these drawbacks and catches and caveats — like the materials you’ve used to build this house are kind of shitty. It’s overpriced, poorly made and you have these products in your house forever. We probably still have Amway products in our house.
And now your essay’s very timely, with Betsy DeVos [daughter-in-law of Amway’s co-founder, who at the time of our conversation had not yet been confirmed as Secretary of Education]. Can you draw a line between how Amway works and DeVos’s ideas about education?
Amway is a very evangelical organization and a highly conservative organization, so it doesn’t surprise me at all that her ideal is private and Christian-based and exclusive and controlled by the upper class. And of course she isn’t thinking about those who would be harmed by it. I mean, I hate using the word Christian because my family is Christian and these are not really Christian values.
Your father eventually became an atheist, and your mother left Unity Church. What about you?
I’m a very spiritual person, but I don’t practice a religion. I think all religion is really interesting. I think the search for truth is a noble one. I take a lot of inspiration from science and meditation — I find contemplation on universal truth being a kind of guiding force in my life
I love that moment in the book where you have your epiphany about God when you were 8 years old. That still feels real to you?
I don’t believe in a deity. It was a commonality that I recognized in that moment — the idea that we are all sprung from the same materials, that we could trace our origin to an exploding star. That was what I recognized in that moment, in my limited child mind. I understood, all of this had to have come from one place — and that felt like god to me. Because it would mean that we all follow the same rule — not a set of rules that have been imposed, like a set of commandments, but a set of scientific laws. These are absolutes. That’s God.
There’s so much about childhood memories here. But all that time, though, you weren’t writing.
I kept journals.
Do you go back and look at them now?
A lot of the journals that I was keeping were poetry, sometimes a diary entry or two. I took a lot of pictures when I was in high school — I was really into photography for a while — and also I have a lot of the same friends, we’re still friends. I sent a draft of the essays to them. If anything was inaccurate they would tell me, but few things were. But when I decided to go back to grad school for writing, I burned my journals from high school and middle school out back of my apartment because I didn’t want anybody to know…
You didn’t want anybody to know what?
How bad I was at one point, how bad of a writer I was at one point.
Not bad, misbehaving bad, but bad as a writer bad.
I regret it now. I saved everything after that — I started a new notebook when I went to college. And I saved the one [referenced in the essay about the terrible high school graduation party] in which I wrote down the events of that night.
I do have to ask. What did your mother say to you after that party, and after you broke into the restroom?
I never told them what happened at Largo Central Park. They found out from the book. On the one hand my parents understand… “I think she probably learned a lesson from having to clean up a stranger’s vomit.” We always sat down and talked about alternatives — what could you have done? Maybe you shouldn’t let this guy you don’t know into our home and vomit on the carpet. (They got a new bathroom rug after that.)
What did she say when she read the essay?
Well, it happened a long time ago, but mostly we just laughed about it. I’ve learned many, many hard lessons since then.
When did you finally make the choice that not only did you want to be a writer, but that you could be successful at it?
After the train accident, I got a job at an elementary school here. They let me out at 3, my boyfriend was a janitor at the same school and didn’t get out till 11. At the same time I was working on an autobiographical novel about a couple that goes train-hopping. I had always been writing and at different times I’d thought I’d be a writer — my father was a journalist, my uncle wrote a novel, my grandfather wrote short stories and screenplays. So it had always been around, and I had a stutter, so it was an easier way to express myself. And when I reached the last line of this epic work, even though it was a terrible novel, I [felt that I] had accomplished what I set out to do — 300 pages — quantity if not quality. My dad was semi-retired at the time and working on his novel and talking to an indie editor who agreed to read the first 50 pages, and he told me I needed to take a writing workshop, which I did. It was a gradual process — there wasn’t much of a community for writing fiction here. I was looking for ways to monetize my skill — and also I’d figured out I was a good researcher — I could pretty much track down anything I wanted to track down, and I found you. By that time I had broken up with the boyfriend, and nonfiction turned out to be something I could do. It fed into the idea I could be some kind of journalist.
The central concept of your novel Binary Star reminds me again of that childhood moment of your being so conscious of this universe. It’s what anyone feels when they look up at a night sky, though not in a city — which makes it much easier to think of your problems as your own.
I really like road tripping across the U.S. to see other ways of living, especially today in our political climate. It’s so easy to forget that not everyone lives in this blue oasis that New York is. I can’t even tell you how many of my personal friends are immigrants, came from other places, people of all colors. It’s just really terrifying [what’s happening now regarding immigration]. It’s just so stupid.
The New York Times has been talking to people who don’t see anything wrong with what Trump’s doing.
Because they don”t know he’s going to screw them over, too. I take comfort in the knowledge that nature always wins.
How do you feel it will win in this case?
Well, he can destroy the environment for now, and the human race will die, and then nature will rise again. He can’t kill the planet — the planet is gonna be fine, earth will be here whatever he does. But you know what else? Nature always wins in the sense that human sexuality is not something you can legislate. People will fuck who they love and marry who they love, and if they can’t do it here they will do it somewhere else. I don’t know, maybe I just have a blind faith in the power of goodness to win out.
Blind faith? In the power of good to win?
Well, you’re questioning how accurate optimism is, but there is an optimistic strain at the same time that seems to come down from the whole idea of seeking truth — that there is something more out there.
How do I say this? I think because life has always won and because life is good that good will win. What the Republican party seeks to do, maybe not even consciously, what they’re aiming to do is to kill love, and I just don’t believe that’s possible. For a while you can prohibit the advancement of loving acts, or people intending to do good, but I think in the end there’s nothing you can do to stop the flood of people that hasn’t already come out in response to small-mindedness. And you know, the women’s march was very empowering — 12 of my friends and I rented a van, all women, it was awesome. So that means, you can fucking fine anything you want to fine — fuck you, it’s not going to matter, I’m going to live my life and my friends are going to live their lives the way they have to live them anyway. If I get pregnant again and I can’t afford to have a baby, you know what I’m gonna do, I’m going to have a fucking abortion. Fuck you! And if I have to do that unsafely and I die, that’s on your conscience — fuck you again. That’s all I have to say. I believe that because human life has its own logic, its own rationality, its own set of rules, this bullshit political legislation that’s not in favor of life, it has an expiration date, you know?
Binary Star got a lot of good reviews. How did that change your life?
Well, I wrote this proposal for Sunshine State before I went on tour for Binary Star, so my agent sent this out while I was on tour, and by the time I returned from the tour I had a contract. I was able to leave my desk job at Bomb. I knew I wasn’t going to make money on Binary Star — it was really strange, not something you could publish an excerpt from in The New Yorker. Once you make back your advance they start sending you royalty checks. I got half of this advance up front; after the agent’s cut that was $5,800 for me, so I could survive for a few months on that. And I began writing a column for Hazlitt about artists’ relationships with their journals.
Interesting, considering your own relationship with journals.
In 2013 I wrote an essay for Paris Review Daily about burning my journals. I had a monthly deadline for Hazlitt, and was kinda planning to look at all of the art forms, but was kind of spreading myself too thin. So when I pitched a second column, I asked myself what do I know really well — anorexia and bulimia. I always think about food in medical terms because of my past relationship to it. What I’m eating…
Like this meal I’m preventing you from eating.. What will that mean to you?
That’ll come clear in retrospect. But, like this time I wrote about breaking up with my husband, I looked at it in relationship to food. He’s the one who cooked in our house. I wrote about how our kitchen has materially transformed since his departure.
I’m lucky because he and I still have a good relationship even though we’re not together anymore. I write about him a lot. He’s always been very supportive. I sent him this essay and he said, “Well, it’s not how I would describe it, but I think it’s a lovely piece.” We’re both to blame and at the same time nobody’s to blame.
Sunshine State presents a really layered perspective on what Florida is. How would you describe your connection to Florida in your development as a person and a writer?
Well, it’s an endlessly rich place. And I think it gets flattened in the media a lot. You know, it’s Florida Man… you know, it ridicules things like mental illness and addiction and domestic violence and it’s funny at times because the headlines are sensational. It’s click-baity, and when you click it always delivers, always some insane story. But when you actually look closer it’s not funny. Those things aren’t funny. It is and it’s not, like using a taco as an i.d in a Taco Bell drive-thru window. Maybe that guy has mental health issues, or his wife died, you just never know…
These people are here, maybe with more frequency than other places. Why do you think that is?
I think there are two sides to that. We have Florida Open Record Laws, we have a lot more access to stories like that here. And also because people are looking for them because we have that reputation here. But also, we have places like Miami, Tampa, where people go to get loose — we have people walking around half naked and half drunk all the time. We had a pill epidemic for a while, like a lot of places in the country. Our domestic violence laws were lagging behind other states for a while. Growing up here I had easy access to, like, you know, the hotels where men would happily buy me alcohol when I was a teenager, and the rave scene that I could easily participate in as a teenager. And homelessness — that’s an epidemic. And people come here looking for a life like the one in Spring Breakers.
That’s another thing — so many people come here.
And there’s Orlando. That’s our mascot — this Disneyfication of life.
How did you choose your title?
Most of the essays are set here, but also there’s the double meaning of that — the sunshine state of denial that would keep Ralph Heath from facing the reality of his illness. It’s an optimistic title mitigated by the seedier truths. Optimism always suggests a more pessimistic point of view — i’m intentionally looking on the bright side, but I know there’s a dark side.
Would you ever come back here to live?
I have a dream of opening up a year-round writers’ colony — though with the arts budget being cut it may not be the best place to open a nonprofit arts colony. [Trump] just wants to disenfranchise people who actually think.
Is staying with your parents weird — going back to your room?
The photo I talk about in that essay [in “Records,” she recounts an incident during a visit with her parents to New York City when a pair of suspicious characters show her a street scene she should photograph, and then try to kidnap her] is still hanging in my room. My parents didn’t know the source of that photo till they read the essay. I was so naive. It’s not my mom’s fault. I was 17 years old; they told me not to leave the hotel and I did anyway. I’m very independent. I insist on it. My mom got married when she was 16 — her mom told her not to. It’s not her mom’s fault that she was in an abusive relationship for 10 years.
You seem to have a very solid sense of self. But that doesn’t jibe with anorexia, which feels like… you answered a comment saying it was the culture’s fault.
Yeah, anorexia, how can I say this? When I was 7 years old, I began cutting myself — which is young for self-abusive behavior like that. I began taking gymnastics when I was 6 and kind of learned that self-punishment reaps rewards — you can feel good and have a sense of achievement by pushing through pain, that you can survive it, and that it actually feels good. At the same time I’m an only child, I spent a lot of time by myself learning how I could manipulate my body, that I could take a safety pin and push it through the calluses on my fingers. When I first did it I was at my grandparents’ house in Cleveland, so I’d explore their house, her desk full of weird things. I found a box of staples and sliced open all my fingers — how weird that I could do that and make myself bleed. I became very good at controlling pain. It became a way to replace other uncomfortable feelings like loneliness. I was like a really awkward kid, because I was artistic and did really well in school and had a stutter, was shy in some ways, lack of social acceptance became a further reason to abuse myself. …I started restricting my caloric intake when I was 7 because I was a really good reader and could read all the labels on the boxes. And I was in gymnastics where there was this pressure to be extremely fit. My childhood understanding, my cultural touchstones for fitness looked like very skinny people. I would restrict my food, and I would work out — I was probably exercise bulimic at age of 8… By the time I reached high school and learned about bulimia, I thought, “Oh that’s a good idea” and I began throwing up my food. It was an occasional thing. My dad even approached me a couple of times when I was a teenager and said, “You know, I saw some vomit next to the toilet, what’s up with that?” and I would say, “Oh I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I mean what is he going to do, aside from taking doors off all the rooms in our house? There had been a precedent in our house to be honest — he expected me to be honest. There were little white lies — like I would lie and say I was going to stay at my friend’s house when I was really going out drinking. But having bulimia wasn’t something I was prepared to be honest about, so what could my parents do? Then when I got to college, I was drinking a lot, eating terrible food, so I got a little chunky for a couple of years, then reacted to that in an extreme way. I began throwing up everything in my junior year. My boyfriend told me I wasn’t allowed to do that anymore, so I just stopped eating. There’s a theory that says that anorexia and bulimia are a form of addiction, and I believe that in a way. I also think there are other things that contribute, but certainly I was engaging in a lot of addictive behaviors. I was taking a lot of Adderall. I was also double-majoring and I was in the honors college and I was student teaching and meanwhile my boyfriend was an asshole, so we would do a lot of drugs together… In the last semester of college, I took a medical leave and went into rehab, dropped out and finished my last six credits at SPC. I got my degree from Hofstra but never finished my teaching degree.
Is anorexia/bulimia something you fully recover from or is there always the danger that you can relapse?
When I was in Denver [doing an artist's residency at a social justice-oriented gallery and forum], the first week I was there I couldn’t eat at all. I hadn’t realized how much work the project would entail so I was under a lot of stress. I was away from my partner and a week after I got there, Donald Trump was elected president. That really drove me insane. And on top of starving myself I couldn’t sleep, I was crying all the time — and the kids I was working with came from terrible unfathomable situations, severely impoverished, and we were working with homeless people. The state of the world looked very bleak to me that month, and it was difficult for me to feed myself at all. I would consider that a brief relapse, but I had the self-awareness to correct. I asked people around me to hold me accountable. I told my parents. Even writing about it was very cathartic. You enter a state of mind when you’re starving intentionally where pain becomes glamorous, but once you write about it…
It deglamorizes it.
Because you see everybody else’s reaction — and you’re like maybe I’m weird, maybe this is wrong. Once you know a way of thinking you never forget it. You can inhabit that way of thinking any time and use all the same legitimizing thought patterns that you did when it was your dominant way of thinking. In that way it is like addiction.
That’s an interesting observation — about the healing nature of writing. Getting those secrets out, they don’t become as dangerous.
Also it destigmatizes it. Anorexia seems like a shallow disease, a woman’s disease, shallow, materialistic — but coming out and unabashedly, unembarrassingly talking about reasons for my anorexia — it’s not that I’m shallow, it’s that I’m really upset Trump got elected, that the children I’m working with are homeless. It’s that I’m so concerned about the world that nothing else can be equally concerning right now. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to focus on homelessness for this art show in Denver. Once you listen to these stories you can’t be judgmental anymore.
Sarah Gerard will be making several appearances locally during her book tour for Sunshine State, including the Largo Public Library on Apr. 24; Inkwood Books on Apr. 30; and June 16 at the University of Tampa. She notes that the Largo Library was where she had her first real job, working as a library assistant shelving books when she was 15. “But they caught me smoking outside and fired me.”
This article appears in Apr 6-13, 2017.