Christian Livermore grew up a shy little girl in a turbulent family sunk in poverty, violence, substance abuse and mental illness. She ate government cheese, suffered from malnutrition and struggled to defend her body against threats both outside the house and within it. And even though she made it out, she has suffered a lifetime of consequences since: excruciating health problems, fear and shame. Especially shame. In We Are Not Okay, Livermore’s deeply personal and moving essays explore what it means to grow up poor in America and ask whether it is possible to outrun the shame it grinds into your bones. She excoriates the inhumanity in how the United States treats its poor and asks the nation to confront how growing up poor in America brutalizes us and warps our perspective on ourselves, on other people and on the world. She concludes with a rather startling suggestion: the dissolution of the United States.
“A moving meditation on American precarity. If, as Baldwin has written, home is an irrevocable condition, We Are Not Okay argues that the same might be said for poverty. Livermore is sensitive, insightful and provocative and her book is not to be missed.”
– Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
“If you’re born white trash, do you ever stop feeling that’s who and what you are? Christian Livermore’s unadorned reflections on ‘class-passing’ are real and raw and nervy. In reading this book, you will see what Americans try to ignore: the damage being done by our class system, which distorts everything it touches. We Are Not Okay tells a far more powerful story than J.D. Vance did, in a truly honest voice – which is what’s been missing from most modern memoirs.”
– Nancy Isenberg, author of White Trash
“We are the beneficiaries of Livermore’s lack of fucks, of her rejecting the luxury of a rhetoric that presupposes an inherently disordered subject can be treated with writerly order, of her relentless and courageous and entertaining and upsetting display of the effects of poverty. To us, Christian Livermore is saying, “Let me explain something to you,” and we need to listen.”
—Robert Fromberg, LA Review of Books
“We Are Not Okay, is not fiction, nor indulgent biography, but a polemic against the tyranny of deprivation. Livermore viscerally illustrates at a granular level, why the poor stay poor and how choice plays no significant part in this perpetuation.”
—Belinda Roman, PhD, Assistant Professor of Economics at St. Mary’s University
“The teetering house on the stark cover of Livermore’s book is home for many of us. If I had a house, it might have been my own. This is We Are Not Okay’s appeal: it is a book that sends a familiar vibration in all of us (except the wealthy 5%), “us” meaning the lower, working, striving-to-be-middle-class end gamers. I think Livermore (and I) are accurate in our assumption that there are more of us in this category, more of “us” than we want to admit to. It’s taken me decades to shrug off my mother’s middle class aspirations and acknowledge that we’ve balanced on that razor edge for generations, a paycheck, a job, a single recession, a whiff of luck and one good friend away from being not okay.”
—JoAnn LoSavio, PhD, Assistant Professor of History, Washington State University, Vancouver
To purchase We Are Not Okay, click here.
Publication Date: October 1, 2022
Print ISBN: 978-1-951724-16-0
eBook ISBN: 978-1-951724-20-7
Indie Blu(e) Publishing 