working-class

Whenever I traveled to New York, I visited Sue at the Museum, making up for the time lost between us. We both marveled that we had escaped a blue collar fate. Other Yonkers girls took service jobs as health care workers or waitressing, a few taught in public schools. There wasn’t anything intrinsically wrong with these jobs, except they were so Yonkas.

Lauren Groff’s collection of stories share only one common thread: the loud, squawking desperation of working-class lives that inevitably come to an end in a one-two knockout punch. I’m glad to see a writer of considerable merit depicting working-class characters that no one really wants to know about. People are dying, rotting away, flicking cigarette ashes on the food they are about to eat, before blowing out their brains with a shotgun.