大象传媒

Lanna Joffrey reads Stephanie Land鈥檚 hard-hitting account of living on minimum wages in present-day America.

Abandoned by her baby鈥檚 father, Stephanie takes the only job she can find, working as a cleaner in the North-Western United States. Spending hours in their houses, she begins to get to know the intimate lives of the people she works for. Her memoir tells the story of this new life, scrubbing bathrooms, scraping food off the ceiling of trailers, and becoming an invisible ghost in the houses she cleans

鈥淚 felt like I had the opportunity to get to know my clients better than any of their relatives did. I鈥檇 learn what they ate for breakfast, what shows they watched, if they鈥檇 been sick and for how long. I鈥檇 see them, even if they weren鈥檛 home, by the imprints left in their beds and tissues on the nightstand. I鈥檇 know them in a way few people did. I鈥檇 become a nameless ghost.鈥�

Stephanie becomes a kind of detective, imagining her invisible clients and discovering the truth about their marriages. One house, for instance, she nick-names 鈥淭he Porn House鈥� - the husband and wife sleep apart, each fantasizing about a different partner, a different life.

Her hard-hitting memoir of what it鈥檚 like to work as a cleaner for a minimum wage shines a light on all service workers in the modern gig economy. 鈥淢y job offered no sick pay, no vacation days, no foreseeable increase in wages. Yet through it all, still I begged to work more.鈥�

Written by Stephanie Land
Read by Lanna Joffrey
Abridged and produced by Elizabeth Burke
A Loftus Media production for 大象传媒 Radio 4