You start off like “wow, everyone has a story” and then 400 pages later you’re like “Jesus, EVERYONE has a story.”
—lola, Goodreads review
My favorite movie is Life in a Day. It’s the movie I’d show an alien to explain humans: 90 minutes of people sharing their lives and sometimes talking about their feelings.
Studs Terkel’s Working is the book version. Subtitle: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do.
Terkel interviewed 100+ people around the United States, including a switchboard operator, two coal miners, a call girl, three paperboys, a fashion model, a migrant farm laborer, Pauline Kael, and Rip Torn, the coach from Dodgeball. He rarely appears in the book; his subjects mostly tell their own stories.
The result could be the best book about the 1970s. Most books about an era focus on what was unusual — culture, fashion, history. The problem is that most people, including me, have no idea what was usual. How did people spend their time? What made them scared or excited? What did kids want to be when they grew up?
It’s easy to think the answers are obvious or timeless, but human life changes with each generation. Here are some things that happen in the first ~100 pages of Working:
- A stewardess gets a week of training on “make-up and poise”, including the most feminine way to let a passenger light her cigarette. On the plane.
- A white, sophisticated feminist businesswoman drops the N-word with a hard “R”, multiple times, to describe her own working conditions.
- A school district gives all the migrant farmworker children a week off to pick vegetables at harvest time, rewarding them with stickers for their hard work.
- A telephone company only recently closed the “rest home” it was maintaining for switchboard operators who experienced nervous breakdowns.
- A college professor complains that the Watergate affair has been “delicately brushed aside” by the American people. (This was before the impeachment.)
- Several people have jobs that don’t really exist anymore: a switchboard operator who worked in a gymnasium-sized room (replaced by extensions and voicemail), an “installment dealer” who went door-to-door collecting checks for rent-to-own products (replaced by ACH and debit cards).
I recognize all the people in this book. People haven’t changed very much. But they live in a different country — an America with more sweat and smoke, where appearing in a commercial gets you mobbed in the subway, where five interview subjects talk about hamburgers but no one mentions sushi.
Putting the era aside, Working might be one of the best books about humans, period. It captures all the big feelings — boredom, envy, sorrow, anger, pride, contentment — but also peppers you with hundreds of facts about corners of the world you’ve never seen, both practical and personal. You don’t just learn the nuances of a receptionist’s job; you hear her fantasies set in the “land of no-phone”, where machines no longer tell her what to do. You get a primer on the installment business, and also a sense of how it feels to be a debt collector, working a job where no one is ever happy to see you.
If you had any one of these conversations at a party, you’d walk away feeling like you made a friend. Reading the whole book is like a long road trip with an interesting stranger at every rest stop. If you wanted to write the Great American Novel, you could scoop up ten of these people at random and use them as your central characters. Any ten. It would work.