Tom Frank interviews Barbara Ehrenreich: “You’re the anti-Ayn Rand”

Belief, Richard Dawkins, Jesus and the minimum wage, "The Fountainhead" and more, in our exclusive conversation

Thomas Frank

I’ve been a devoted fan of Barbara Ehrenreich’s writing ever since I discovered Fear of Falling, her book about middle-class dreams, during a summer vacation when I was in graduate school. Reading it on a beach somewhere, I felt a light went on in my head; she was describing the culture of our times in a way that was both persuasive and accessible, and yet that I had come across nowhere else, not even in academia. For her 2001 book, the massive best-seller Nickel and Dimed, she took a series of service jobs incognito and told the world what the experience was like. Bright-Sided, which she published in 2009, saw her turn her painstaking scrutiny on the quasi-religious industry of positive thinking.

Somewhere along the line, I became Barbara’s friend, and it occurred to me that the factor that makes each of her books so completely unique in American intellectual life is her persistent sensitivity to matters of social class. She can always see through the smokescreen, the cloud of fibs we generate to make ourselves feel better about a world where the work of the many subsidizes the opulent lifestyles of the few. That, plus the fact that she writes damned well. Better than almost anyone out there, in fact.