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How Much Is My Writing Worth?
On my ambivalent relationship with money — as a mother, writer, professional, and budding anticapitalist
I hate asking for money. For years, I made just enough to get by, taking pride in my second hand clothes and the veggie casseroles I made on Sunday to last me the week. I drove a $1,500 Honda Accord that I’d bought with 297,000 miles on it, and I scoffed at my 20-something peers who wanted fancy careers and nice things.
I knew better. I didn’t need nice things. Nice things don’t make people happy. Besides, I was busy co-founding a nonprofit, trying to make the world a better place. I worked my “day job” without pay for five years, while writing a novel and supporting myself on bartending tips. Some people, like the boyfriend who would become my husband, thought I was nuts. I didn’t mind. I was more enlightened, less attached to material things.
My parents might have given birth to me at the dawn of the “decade of greed,” but they weren’t ready to give up their hippie ideals just yet. They eschewed the excesses of the 1980s, proudly modeling frugality throughout my childhood — by design and also by necessity. Their elementary school teacher salaries covered the basics and then some, but still, we had to be careful.
My sister and I shared everything with each other, save our toothbrushes. We shared a room, a bunk bed, a semiweekly bath, and the one basket that held all our toys. We always split dinners on the rare occasions we went out to eat, and we were never allowed to order drinks. We counted out three hundred and fifty pennies from my father’s change jar once a month so we could buy a pint of ice cream.
We ate bread heels, scraped the mold off old fruit, and whipped up cream cheese with milk so it would last longer.
“We don’t want to be wasteful,” my parents said. “Besides, it saves money.”
We watched TV just once a week, dragging our boxy television set from the hall closet on a wheeled cart. We muted the commercials. As such, I didn’t know to pine for things. Sure, some of my friends had cooler toys (and more of them), but even at the tender age of eight, I understood that any given toy became infinitely less cool on the rare occasion that it…
