Parenthood as a slalom toward bankruptcy: A new age of precarity

Authors anticipated culture we’ve been living through, made worse by pandemic

There is a line in the second chapter of Lynn Steger Strong’s recently released novel, “Want,” that caused me to gasp as though a chainsaw-wielding maniac had just shown up on the page determined to kill the narrator: “My husband still owed more than a hundred grand in student loans from undergrad.”

This line followed a passage where the narrator, an unnamed woman living in New York City with her husband and two young children, recounts how they managed to get on an unstoppable trajectory toward bankruptcy — getting pregnant while still a PhD student, needing a Csection that was not covered by insurance ($30,000), two root canals and then a crown for failing teeth (more tens of thousands of dollars). The line about the student loan debt was just the capper after a series of emotional body blows delivered to the reader through close, first-person narration.

It will be some time before we see literature directly inspired by the pandemic, but as it turns out, some artists anticipated the culture we’ve been living through that the pandemic has exacerbated. Let’s call it the “Age of Precarity.”

Reading “Want” brought to mind “Perfect Tunes” by Emily Gould (published in April) and Lydia Kiesling’s “The Golden State” (2018) — two other recent novels that illuminate the Age of Precarity. All three center on the main characters’ relationships with their young children as they work to provide them safety and security in a world that seems fundamentally hostile to those ends.

“Perfect Tunes” is the story of Laura, a young and talented songwriter at the start of the new millennium who gets pregnant with the child of a charismatic, drug-addicted musician on the cusp of stardom. The bulk of the novel centers on Laura 15 years later, raising her teenage daughter as a single mom.

Kiesling’s Daphne is another young mother, separated from her Turkish husband who can’t re-enter the country because of visa problems.

These women are educated, from stable middle class or better backgrounds, and yet even though they are employed, sometimes working multiple jobs and side hustles, they fall further and further into debt. This is not the deprivation of John Steinbeck’s Depression-era Dust Bowl, but a unique portrait of how difficult it is to get ahead in a society that seems to push wealth ever upward and prosperity out of reach.

These characters want nothing more than anyone ever has — love, a family, some security — but they are doomed almost before they start, because of the costs of their own education and just birthing (let alone raising) a child.

In the end, none of these novels are stories of complaint or grievance. They are all animated by the fierce love of these mothers for their children, the determination to do right by them. After the litany of debts, Steger’s narrator calls her children “the two best things in our lives.”

The love for their children is inspiring, but speaking as someone who, for the moment, is on the right side of the economic divide, the level of difficulty we attach to parents trying to do right by their children is infuriating. These are not despairing novels. All of them have periods where the narrators experience grace and joy. They are stories of survival, but even attaching that word to paths that we previously would’ve considered as mundane is saying something.

We are just waking up to the reality of the Age of Precarity. I wonder how many of us it will claim before we choose something different.

John Warner is the author of “Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities.”