And finally i like to acknowledge and send gratitude to all central workers and First Responders across the globe. Tonight we celebrate this is all i got which is the spirit of the life of a young homeless single mother undid her quest to find stability and shelter here in new york city. The awardwinning journalist and this is her third book and she has written about inequality in its many forms from the new york times, new york, the new republic, the nation, slate and salon. And the producer at npr. And to be in conversation with nonfiction critic. Previously an editor of the book review and Senior Editor at harpers magazine. And those followed by q a from all viewers. Please remember to pose your question on the twitter feed at nyu. Now i pass the microphone to jen to get us started. Thank you again. Hello. Congratulations on your book. And then to start off and how we god into the subject and this is a narrative work of fiction in that bed that it was true to follow the journey of a remarkable young woman that i call camilla. That is not her real name. And while finding stability at the same time, through social services and what it means to be a 22 yearold with no margin of error while having ambitions. My goal was left to focus exclusively on homelessness so this is the interim crisis on the welfare state with gender discrimination with the unequal burden that falls to women. You met camilla and 2015 and she was in the shelter i was wondering how you decided she was somebody you wanted to write about . I wanted to write about homelessness. I felt that we were living through it now worse than ever a real human rights crisis not totally undiscussed but the big issues and data points we just didnt have any opportunities to experience through the process of the narrative so why reach out to organizations to reach out to city shelters. It is the abomination and that that goes completely by the publics if i had a bigger ink on institution and i would bring a lawsuit against the city instead i reach out to private shelters and i found one on park flow i wasnt looking to find a shelter at this cultural apex but that is where i found it, the contract presents itsel itself. Met with the woman who runs a very small shelter and only has a couple Staff Members and basically said great, and come, do whatever you want and just needs to run the wednesday night meeting and she said thats a male condensate with their babies and talk about their week and whats coming when this whats going on once you do that you can do anything you want. I was surprised those that said great. Welcome. So it also raised a complicated an ethical problem. And thats just they may not want to show me as a reporter so thats the line to walk i was very aware of from the start. And with that purpose they are. And then to be represented or not and i really did stick with that which was frustrating at times as a journalist as a person who was disproportionate to issue power in that situation. There were four women who came forward and said i am open and spend some time together and see how this works. So they are all fascinating was so happy to get to know and then there was camilla. And then we just had a spark. With nonfiction writers choosing the subject it is a oneway choice but it isnt and that people wanting to open up to each other. And then pulled me into her life and had a connection from the start and to have the privilege to write about and then when evicted from the shelter it was this moment to decide and then to be so remarkable to me i decided that is where the book needed to go. Camellia on camilla has a brilliant mind and tenacious and the criminal justice student when i met her and worked very hard to maintain that role as the leaders will see. She is someone center on suitor parents for Child Support and then one and then in foster care said the commute is insane it is abusive and rented her own room and graduated early. It seemed to me that every the caseworker should match every professor that she couldnt make the system work so could get out of it entirely then no one could i wanted to find out if that was a possibility. One of the things im struck by coming from the very beginning that camilla is extremely sharp and understands what her rights are that one of the things that is interesting and the figure in this book. Including those that run a private soldier on shelter. And those as quite a complicated figure. And annette shelter. And then to be suspicious of camilla and if they could explain a little bit because. It is interesting when a speak to people about the book and those have been able to read it there is such a variety and there is some people and now i just touch my face. [laughter] what a tough cookie she really had to lay it down and then some people think thats the way to deal with women and property and thats also not a real name that the one that i know will tell you she had been around the block doing this work for decades and dealt with the drama. And in the very small shelter with a very Big Personality and those that it would cost and paying for it out of public Assistance Funds to have a studio apartment in her mind and prime brooklyn and she really wanted to make sure there were not people who are trying to pull one over on her just because they had a challenge in life. She also knew because she had been through it before, a lot of people can cause trouble who need a lot more support and the shelter can offer offers a wednesday meeting with a private bathroom and the kitchen and bath which is unheardof but housing for the homeless that provides Mental Health support or housing or anything like tha that. So for deal was im trying to keep this running with the soup kitchen downstairs rooms upstairs no drama. The rules are the rules of you dont like them, then there is a whole public city system that can take you. And at times i would find the way she enforced her rules calling herself the enforcer to be puzzling and tricky but at other times i would think this is the reason all the women are here she save the shelter from collapse and are doing things that are not even aware of that is possible and Authority Figures are tough sometime so i agree she is complicated. So working on that very Grassroots Level which is so small and intense will be a complicated job. In addition to those for those that live in a shelter from what i understand they have children . If you are accepted into the shelter at your last trimester then you can stay for one year and that is it. Depending on when you checkin between nine months and 12 months old when you check out. Its also a very intense time of life. One of the things that comes up is the fact that camilla and her last trimester has her baby who is a little boy and dealt with homelessness because her mother kicked her out when she was a teenager . She had to stay in the shelter when she was younger. And to be in and out of the system. But once she has baby that is a whole other layer things that she has to deal with and think about and then maybe we can talk about that and where those come up to her and then she says wait a second and then i could have just gotten a parttime job and thats a big part of it. So i guess go ahead. Complications for a person in poverty. Some of that is just logic if you dont have a place to stay you can crash with a friend much more easily if theres a couch available if you dont have a baby. Or you get the apartment with roommates and craigslist post individual bedrooms. If you can pay for which is still difficult or if there is a baby in the mix. And then there is a 9 00 oclock curfew. And then working at the applebees in downtown brooklyn could only work one shift that paid nothing because of the shelter curfew but beyond that there are very few daycares that will take children at night. So what it means to shoulder all of this with the women in the shelter with the majority of homeless families that talking about those that carry the burden. So one of the things i do remember at a certain point in those and then thats just impossible. And then to find a place that takes the voucher and at the same time has to go to school Something Like a two hour commute. She is still enrolled in the college at the end of the line and then if youre dealing with the last privilege new york you go to the end of the line. That is a very difficult commute. And then to live in the overcrowded apartment in the bronx for a while dropping her son off in downtown brooklyn to take the subway on a bus and another bus and then the city job and then on the way back it was really something. This is something that is important to her but it becomes clear that when she has a child everybody in the system and that she talks to is trying to steer her that seems to be and is very clear why she doesnt want to do that and can you explain that a little bit and to prove that you were working full time. And then to go to the Job Placement Offices sitting in a very crowded room eight hours a day with your child in daycare it could be a city job talked about picking up cans in the park im not just going to go do that a lot of that work went private with Healthcare Work which that is entirely underpaid and consuming so her options it seems if you follow the advice to sit in the Job Placement Office whether it is childcare or elsewhere or to stick it out in school and the ambition to work in criminal justice when she was graduated she was part of the state justice league. I dont think thats what its called. [laughter]. Its not what she imagined for herself, and why should it be . She had this extraordinary mind and has a desire to serve in our country. And frankly, pretty much all of the women that i knew from the shelter were remarkable in their own way. One of them had a law degree from russia, was an incredibly talented photographer who wanted to do work in fashion at working the applebees lunch shift. The notion that people who are homeless are somehow lacking in talent or drive such a fallacy. People that are homeless are usually boring to people who are poor in a country that thinks that more and more impossible unless you want to make a life picking up cans in the park. Host that is another thing you realize reading the book is to describe it by describing the experiences through her own experiences just the experiences she has trying to navigate and experience even one that she knows really, really well. One of the things that kept surprising me first of all is how much she would have to go to all these offices in person, wait for somebody to talk to, talk to that person and they would tell her to go to another floor in the building, to go to another building across the street to talk to someone else or even though she knew the system very well there were a few times that she was thrown for a loop because of some sort of paperwork issue shes denied her benefits. I was thinking for instance, she had filed a Workers Compensation claim for a job she worked earlier and finally, i think a year or two after words, the money had actually come in and for that reason all of her benefits were cut off. Do i have that right . Guest that is part of the reason and even more to your point, there was a letter that was lost in the mail coming in i know it was lost in the mail because we would go to her p. O. Box almost every single day. When she was in high school, shed gotten herself a p. O. Box across the street because she knew any court documents, state documents etc. Could into the emails, they needed to be sent in as long as she had the p. O. Box she would be able to stay on top of things. Part of this commute from the bronx to the beach and from brooklyn on the way we often stopped on 34th street to go to the p. O. Box most days and there was a little bit of paperwork that said she was missing some documents and never got it and because of that she lost welfare, she was the child care. We never quite figured out how she lost her medicaid benefits, but even receiving a bit of mail is something that happens and you are homeless, that is an incredibly tricky thing. And i remember when we went to the Welfare Office on 14th street for five days once a week we would go five weeks in a row just to confirm that her rent subsidy check had been sent to the shelter. When she was in school and working that would mean missing workstudy jobs to hear the person isnt here today or your case has been transferred. That degree of complicated policy and the system that requires such an exceeding burden of how they can show up and navigate having to deal with this purgatory which is sometimes worse. Its often held because they often dont follow their own policies. It something that is systematically enforced to keep people from getting their benefits and to keep people out of the system, that it is a form of limiting the amount that we invest in our poorest americans and driving people out entirely but not towards anything else. Just the form, and i mean this in a very literal way, the map is because the system is that crazy. Host connected to that, i dont know if you can speak to this but now we are living in a situation where offices are shut and nobodys giving much in person for the most part. Do you know what is happening for people who are trying to access their benefits . Guest it is unsurprisingly a nightmare. There is one Food Stamp Office currently open and thoroug east. Most of the Welfare Offices are closed and of course they need to be for social distancing right now. At the same time as we know theres 1. 5 million newly unemployed people. New york city, 22 million nationally just in the past month and the system has been completely overloaded so you can file online and when you can do something over the phone is there a way that you can get through and this is where we are headed. When i think about how ends high yearly overloaded and dysfunctional system was in the best of times and how unprecedented prosperity that ended sharply but have lasted quite a long time, that was the time we could have strengthened the safety net but instead we shredded it to systematically and i know how impossible it is when their ratings rooms are full at how entirely devastatingly screwed we are considering what is about to come and what has already become. Host the way the book is narrated his what you were talking about at the beginning of the conversation. I believe you really are telling her story through the experience through her eyes. You come into it a little bit and they can get into that in a second because i think its important, but i was wondering if, i did get the sense that there was a lot of invisible research that took place in terms of your familiarity with policy. Did you talk to a lot of people that were on the other side of it, on the government side of the system in terms of how they see it and where they see it going. Whether it is the case but its this sort of deliberate starti starting. They are trying to strengthen it in some way. Guest i didnt really. I did talk to some people, certainlpeople cancertainly divo people, certainly but i did and do an enormous amount of background revealing. I read a lot of policy papers and a lot of studies. There is a huge amount of scholarship about how all of this functions and i think its got to be really maddening and heartbreaking to be a scholar who has devoted a lifetime of research to try to shake people about this and say these are the problems and heres how we need to fix them. I dont think there is a university in america that doesnt have at least i dont know, two or three people working on these issues at all times not to mention the people that have been thinking about this in our government for years so i did a lot of research in that way. Honestly, in addition to really drilling down into the experience and supplementing that with my own reading and conversations, i didnt want to flag that i was in the office is doing this reporting. You know, i would show up in pretty much any office, the Child Support office, the welfare center, family court, you name it. And i was almost always the only white person there is not alwa always. I think because of camilla has a similar job in line and curly hair, there was a lot of assumption that as people called it, the grandmother in my early 40s that really threw me for a loop. When i wasnt considered to be the grandmother [laughter] i was often considered to be the social worker. People wouldnt say or do the grandmother of the worker but there was sometimes a little passing reference. So that was useful. In fact, whe win iowa when i wae reporting i would either be recording on my iphone where i would often just be taking notes because i was to sting all the time but it wasnt often i would take out one of my reporters notebooks and a pen because my goal was to see what could be shown to me when people were only showing it to camilla. Host you are with her it seems almost all the time and im wondering one of the things she really struggles with its really in addition to the obvious things she struggles with is this question of loneliness and connection because shes alienated. She wants to have a connection it sounds like with her father in particular but he keeps blowing her off. And you see at a certain point for the year you are reporting on her life you become one of her most constant connections. You do talk about the ethical boundaries and things that you have to think about. So i was wondering if you could speak a little bit about that. Guest i can speak about that all night. My insomnia for years. [laughter] left me begin this way. When i hear report at least in a way i most wanted to report in this bucket is not to interview someone. It is to hang out and see what is revealed. I also am someone who believes if they share themselves with me i will share themselves with them. Sometimes the connection can get a little complicated especially when you care about the people you are reporting about which i often do and that is often why i am reporting about them. And so, often what it means to do a merge and reporting where you spend an enormous amount of time and the enormous situations with someone and it is intense. Yes, we got very, very close as i felt we should on a certain level while i would still remind her im taking notes, the recorder is on, here is my notebook. But it is a complicated thing and maybe one of the most important to talk about when our privilege is so diametrically opposed, when i would leave the shelter in the bronx or the office and go back to my home in brooklyn and have a very different life with my family than the one she was getting to have. I write in the book and think about this a lot, my cousin and my daughter had spent a massive amount of time and they care about her very deeply and there was a moment in which she was getting it to did from her shelter and she may not have a place to land and my daughter who was then eight was so serious, she couldnt find the words were the anger that she felt for what she wanted to tell me i was to my face and thats when i taught her the word for hypocrite. I have a couch that she could crash on and i wasnt giving it to her. Part of that is because as a journalist i needed to see how sick she would solve the problem for herself and she did. That is what the book was about. I also know that isnt a permanent solution into the larger issues, that is the point of this whole book is what it means to live with other systemic failure, what it means to live as a society with these issues that cant be repaired by individuals or at least individuals who dont have the same last name so it was this tricky line i would have to walk because i did care about her and we were so close and i was thinking last night when i couldnt sleep about a book called all of our ten. She felt for her protagonist baby and her baby cared for her and they lived in this communal way and maybe if my daughter had been, that seems like a solution in some ways but i dont think so because the whole point was. Between the dispassionate journalism and compassionate journalism. When i was worried about her son freezing during a cold winter in which he didnt have a snowsuit and she asked her father to fight alongside with a snowsuit for christmas and i knew he wasnt going to, i bought him a snowsuit. I didnt need part of the story to the alonso diving to death. That one was a bridge too far for me but these are all delicate negotiations and they made a point to write about them all and to flag them in the book and wrestle with them a little bit. Not just so the book is more honest but because i think that it is a different conversation that we could be having around what it means to make nonfiction outside of the old rules of journalism which is in this separation because they think that separation couldnt make it look like this and it also justt couldnt be who i am as a person, and that was important for me to be true, too. Host one of the things i wondered when i was reading it, because you do such an amazing job of showing exactly what it is she needs to do in order to sort of just surviving the system, but she is also so aware of the different parts of it. How it works because her mother had a place in projects. Host her mother was able to pay the rent on a private apartment where she grew up because she had section eight so it was the voucher system that whether you were conservative or liberal, people agreed that it was a humane project to help people in housing insecurity pay their rent. Guest the city will not add new names to the list because there are never any new section eight cases that open. Scholars in the past i would be hardpressed to find someone who doesnt believe that the ways to help people pay rent in this price gouging Housing Market or even back in a different era when it wasnt so severe that it ithat is the way to prevent homelessness and so her mother had section eight and was able to keep her kids and a stable apartment most of the time. There was a spell but the landlords wouldnt take the checks because government checks are things that fuel stained in some way but other then that thethan thatthey had a stable ad then her mom hit the jackpot and got a place in the projects where camilla has been on the waiting list since long before she had the baby. There is 175,000 families on the wait list of Public Housing in new york. 250,000 people whose greatest hope, greatest dream is other peoples Worst Nightmare which is a life in the projects. Host i wanted to ask jessica because i think we might have some questions from the audience. Guest we do. I am happily through the book and i cannot wait to finish. Im going to pick it up right after this conversation. The first question is actually something ive been wondering. You talk about the close connections and relationships that you formed in the shelter throughout the year that you immersed your self. Im wondering how a project like this ends. What does that look like and how do you step away physically and what are the logistics it was always the arrangements with her that i was going to report her first year of motherhood and that whatever happens beyond that is private and it was really important and a privile privilege. There was a clear time when i needed to step out of the journalist role and just be someone that knew her and left her. And you know, its been like many relationships since this ended when they go through. They are in touch a lot and we go through. They are not. It flows like any other relationships in many ways but not as a relationship with a journalist. And as a protagonist anymore, but just to people that have known each other for some complicated years. The first year element is when the curtain fell down. Obviously this doesnt have an end and at that point, you know, the story is carried forth in her sons story etc. But these continuations of each others stories. I think a lot and write a lot about how much privilege and poverty in the country is determined by our inheritance in every sense of the word, how we were raised and by whom and whether there is an Emergency Fund for a story down payment for a house or college fund that in this hideously unequal system it is all an inheritance game and so, you know, the stories prolong the story sort of infinitely. And i needed to have the time to bring the curtain down, so the first birthday was that time and i think organically within the narrative it was the right time to end the. Host one of the viewers is wondering, this is a twofold question. One, throughout the year that you knew her, what kept her and her son going as she overcame so much, and then where is camilla now and what is she up to today . Guest tenacity like i have never seen in anyone. Her drive is just extraordinary. And, so she kept her going. She is now in different circumstances. She got married and that has afforded her a measure of stability that she couldnt find on her own as someone who was trying to make it work on her own. That is inflationary. She married for love. But i do write about how it doesnt feel like an uncomplicated happy ending to me. Im happy she found love and stability, but i am appalled that she couldnt find stability without them. Host finally one of the viewers asked about one of your next projects with your focus on inequality and the present situation. I remain so obsessed with these issues that i imagine they would probably leave me elsewhere. This book is an intense process for a long time and it just came out today. Writing a book is a huge commitment and you have to want it so badly. Whenever i mentor people i say to them there are three things you should never do unless you desperately wanted to them, write a book, move to new york or have a baby. Im thrilled to be in new york and raising my baby, but i dont know what the next book i am committed to yet. I would love to talk about any ideas that may come though. Host i would like to say congratulations once again on your reporting and important work to all of the viewers. This is all ive got for today. Im about halfway through the book and i couldnt recommend it more. If any of you have anything you would like to close with, you may go ahead but i think that we are just about finished. Guest i want to thank you and the institute of Public Knowledge and everyone at random house and my family. It is incredibly meaningful to me to be able to talk about this book and really have an opportunity to connect account of these ideas that are so essential right now. I know that we are doing that remotely