The Melancholia of Class: A Manifesto for the Working Class

by Cynthia Cruz

What does it mean to be working-class in a middle-class world? Cynthia Cruz shows us how class affects culture and our mental health and what we can do about it — calling not for assimilation, but for annihilation.

To be working-class in a middle-class world is to be a ghost. Excluded, marginalised, and subjected to violence, the working class is also deemed by those in power to not exist. We are left with a choice between assimilation into middle-class values and culture, leaving our working-class origins behind, or total annihilation.

In The Melancholia of Class , Cynthia Cruz analyses how this choice between assimilation or annihilation has played out in the lives of working-class musicians, artists, writers, and filmmakers — including Amy Winehouse, Ian Curtis, Jason Molina, Barbara Loden, and many more — and the resultant Freudian melancholia that ensues when the working-class subject leaves their origins to “become someone,” only to find that they lose themselves in the process.

Part memoir, part cultural theory, and part polemic, The Melancholia of Class shows us how we can resist assimilation, uplifting and carrying our working-class origins and communities with us, as we break the barriers of the middle-class world. There are so many of us, all of us waiting. If we came together, who knows what we could do.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, Sociology, Philosophy, Psychology, Class, Cultural

Kindle Edition

First published July 13, 2021

About the author

Cynthia Cruz is the author of Ruin (Alice James Books) as well as The Glimmering Room, Wunderkammer and How the End Begins (all from Four Way Books). She is the recipient of fellowships from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and a Hodder Fellowship. An essayist and art writer, her first collection of essays, Notes Toward a New Language is forthcoming. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and is currently a doctoral student in Germanic Language and Literature.

Reviews

[Andrew]

I feel…deeply ambivalent about this. On the one hand, the book is a wonderfully personal, and importantly affective description of what life is for so many of us. Being given a total and dismissive “no” by a supposedly trusted and caring academic mentor upon expressing interest in a PhD thanks to class disjunction was so deeply relatable I had to put the book down for a bit. Further, Cruz’s careful elucidation of how it feels to never be able to escape your class, along with the destructive and futile drive/demand to try, as well as the call for class solidarity, is deeply powerful.

And yet. First, there is no attempt to actually define class, or working class, or middle class. Cruz even notes that she’ll use middle class, bourgeoisie, and ruling class interchangeably despite the fact that these are very much not interchangeable things. Is class something you inherit by birth? An identity? A material social position? Maybe, and yet there’s no attempt to actually clarify this. Is class mobility possible? Who knows? From this text you’d get the idea the middle class just sort of sprang into existence in the past and is a self-contained hereditary aristocracy. Is current Bruce Springsteen working or middle class? (????) The inclusion of police officer in a list of working class professions only serves to seriously deepen the mistrust of what’s going on here, and what is obscured by the lack of clear definition.

Second, oof, race. While Cruz very much directly acknowledges that the concept of working class as exclusively white is a racist construct and absurd on its face, the text itself never bothers to challenge this in practice. Literally every single cultural example in the work is white, and there is certainly no attempt to acknowledge the Black roots of the predominantly rock-derived music she used as examples. This also leads into an issue that very much stood out for me but may not be such an problem for others, which is the sheer and overwhelming Anglophilia throughout. Again, Cruz’s discussion of going mod in high school as a form of working class rebellion was deeply personally relevant, but the attempt to extrapolate a whole critique from this looks awkward. I highly doubt that The Jam are really literally the only rock band to espouse a working class ethos, a claim which is thus pretty damn suspect, and the failure to even acknowledge the existence of whole genres like rap make it look just sort of absurd. The attachment to Anglo language (“whilst”), culture, and criticism to the extreme exclusion of literally any non-white culture or experience (other than Baldwin on why he had to go to Paris) does not, I would argue, make for a very inclusive or compelling manifesto for a working class that doesn’t conform to a JD Vance situation with better (aka more English) taste.

I’m sure there’s more here to wonder about, but.

[Fabio Marcon · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Questo libro è popolato di figure simili a spettri. Nè viva nè morta, la working class esiste tra i mondi.”

Raccontando la sua storia personale, Cynthia Cruz evoca le ombre del mio passato che credevo rimosse: la mancanza di ambizione o di fiducia nei miei mezzi o l’odio profondo per i miei, che non mi hanno mai dato gli strumenti per affrancarmi quando semplicemente non conoscevano l’esistenza di quegli strumenti, esattamente come i genitori dell’autrice.

Con il suo memoir tardo adolescenziale di outcast ai margini, Cruz mi ha sventolato davanti al naso la mancata elaborazione della mia identità working class che, appena possibile, ho subito soffocato nel sonno e abbandonato in un sudicio parcheggio di periferia. Ed eccomi qua, decenni dopo, a sentirmi nella stessa condizione di altri infelici profughə di classe come Ian Curtis, Barbara Loden o Amy Winehouse (senza ovviamente la loro fama) citati nel libro: perso in un buio intervallo spazio-temporale tra un mondo a cui non appartengo e un altro in cui non mi riconosco.

Un saggio dal respiro personale e allo stesso tempo collettivo (non potrebbe essere altrimenti) che nutre di rabbia e dolore. Uno specchio e un bisturi, cura ferite dimenticate e apre nuove lacerazioni.

Potentissimo, ma vorrei non averlo letto.

[Stefan Szczelkun · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is thinking about class oppression with a raw power and clarity I’ve not seen before.
Written as a working class intellectual who found she had no choice but to inhabit a middle-class world that refused to allow her to do what she wanted to. At all costs it didn’t want her to be a ‘working class’ intellectual. She manages to convey the intense pressure, raw pain and rage that this causes. How it can eraze people. As an intellectual there is no going back to the working class community you came from. She argues that the options are between an undead life (being someone you are not) and a life of melancholia in which we search in vain for the community we remember from our early life. It’s a brutal book but it rings so true I couldn’t put it down!

“Melancholia, too, is an unconscious desire to return to our origins, while simultaneously also a revulsion, a parallel desire to stay away. We are without a home in the world and we are without a home in our psyche and body. A ghost within a ghost, dead but still living.“ p.154

This is a book about the things that we haven’t been able to say about class oppression. Cruz has found ways to say them, chant them and see how some working class artists have dealt with these impossible forces. Her chosen artists whose life or work gives form to these struggles include: Paul Weller, Amy Winehouse, Ian Curtis of Joy Division, film-makers Barbara Loden, Joanna Hogg and Clair Denis, US musicians Bruce Springsteen, Jason Molina, Charlyn Marshal (Catpower) and Mark Linkous, writer Clarice Lispector and London based artist Laura Oldfield Ford. She decodes the work and lives of these artists in the light of her insights and theories about the alienation we face.

At times it’s an unrelenting and brutal book... Logically class oppression is not a trifle. Logically the mechanisms of oppression are not going to be laid out like surgical instruments before an operation. Logicaly its operation has got to be covert, and ITS GOT TO HURT LIKE FUCK.

Written in punchy and crystalline prose she takes ideas I have held onto as vague feelings and nails them to the page. There are plenty of quotable moments when you shout: ‘Yes that’s it!’

And yes, as well as understanding my rage better I also see my sister, who died of anorexia at age 18, in a new way.

Cruz starts off by thinking about her own class struggle as a working-class intellectual. The constant barriers and put downs she faced. From these insights she formulates a dramatic theory. We working-class intellectuals are the undead. We have to hide our true selves in the middle class environments we have risen into, and it’s killing us. It’s a dramatic idea, but that is my experience. Not just that but it feels like a breakthrough in acknowledging just how violent and damaging our exclusion is. The language of aspiration or 'passing' completely normalises this violence and dresses it in the clothes of glamorous opportunity, with a reverse side of abject personal failure should you not agree to the terms and conditions.

All I can add to this book is that we are forced to leave the communities we were born into because there is no intellectual working-class culture. There is no place for us to flourish as artists and writers within working-class communities. Class oppression demands that working-class people in general see themselves as of lesser intelligence and without refinement or taste. There is embarrassment when asked to discuss philosophical or poetic ideas. We don’t have the self-confidence to say why we like or don’t like certain art works, and so forth. All that is set in stone, or rather in lack of concrete institutions. There are no art galleries on council estates...

It’s no good wanting to return to the place of our origin, if that place has no intellectual or cultural institutions to nurture and accommodate us. There is no point in tethering ourselves to our origins (page 146) if those origins have no intellectual discourse. For the melancholia to end we have to build a working-class (intellectual) culture on our own terms. But anyway the place we yearn for is a memory from our formative years. The memory is of the experience of being torn away from our people. We cannot return to a memory, we can only grieve the loss associated with it.

Existing cultural institutions must become pervious to the working-class communities that usually surround them. That means working-class people being part of the acquisition, show planning, and critical evaluation processes, and not in a nominal way!

My own way of surviving was to join outlier artist collectives. The discussion in this book is mainly about individuals. But she ends with a collective appeal:

“We have learnt to survive, just barely, in the spaces between – between worlds, between deaths – in an endless waiting. Is it not possible for us to navigate together, in an act of resistance against the system that would like us dead, or if you’re not dead, alive, but just barely?” p.196

Stefan Szczelkun July and November 2021

Szczelkun is author of ‘SiLENCE! the silencing of working class culture in the C20th’.
https://stefan-szczelkun.blogspot.com...

PS a much more powerful review from Fran Lock is here:
https://www.culturematters.org.uk/ind...

My full review is now published in the Journal 'Subjectivity'
https://trebuchet.public.springernatu...

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A frustrating and slightly disappointing read despite existing in and concerned with an intellectual lineage of figures I have much interest in and respect for including Mark Fisher and Walter Benjamin. Still, this rarely goes beyond the surface and when it does, it doesn't quite land.

One major qualm and one I'm seeing more often in recent texts, is an overly fluid notion of class politics. The Rosetta Stone that Cruz finds early on is a realization that she is working, rather than middle class. This point gets expanded on ad nauseum, as Cruz, with the zealotry of the recently diagnosed, uses this concept as the spine of much of the book, sometimes returning to it to the point of parody.

Cruz specifically says she intends to conflate middle, upper and bourgeois labels and this conflating does no favors to her argument. Much like the recent discourse on the 'Professional Managerial Class' (nowhere more prevelant than the recent book 'Virtue Horders' by Catherine Lui, the conflating of all abundantly precarious classes together creates a class character that feels both incoherent at times and bound for failure.

That said, I see where the text shines through at times in it's cultural analysis. It's best moments show great promise. But it feels bogged down by a lot of unneeded baggage and some repetitive argumentation, which often is less convincing as it goes along.

[Tim Rideout · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘There are so many of us, all of us waiting. If we came together, who knows what we could do.’

This book has had the most profound effect upon me and I have yet to codify all of my thoughts about it.

I came to the work following a recommendation made by a fellow PhD student. It has a direct bearing on my own research into Gothic fiction’s engagement with the precarity created by neoliberalism.

However, I did not expect to have such a profound, personal response to Cruz’s diagnosis. Her reflections on neoliberalism’s erasure of the working class resonated with me. The aching nostalgia for the time and place of childhood and adolescence, the depression that results from the inevitable alienation, even the compulsion to collect and document the past, all represented personal ‘light bulb’ moments. It were as if Cruz had looked directly into my soul.

[Tele_well · Rating 4 out of 5]

Surprisingly good. Instead of academic verbose, the author speaks of her own lived experience and interwines it with the lives of artists - musicians, writers, film makers. The scope is quite wide: from Ian Curtis and Paul Weller to film maker Barbara Loden.

[dv · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un libro che non è un saggio psicologico (nonostante la precisione dei riferimenti a Freud e Lacan), ma piuttosto un memoriale di esperienza vissuta, che descrive la melanconia di aver lasciato la "working class" per assimilarsi alla classe media, appiattiti sui miti neoliberisti dell'uguaglianza e della meritocrazia (importanti le connessioni implicite con La tirannia del merito di Michael Sandel). Un libro appassionato e sincero, cui si perdonano la natura composita e qualche ripetizione e di cui si apprezzano gli esempi legati alla letteratura, al cinema e alla musica, quest'ultima in particolare arte che mostra bene le sofferenze della middle class (Paul Weller, Ian Curtis, Amy Winehouse, Jason Molina, Mark Linkous, Chan Marshall), spesso sulla scorta di simili riflessioni di Mark Fisher. Pollice in su per i saggi della collana Blu Atlantide, che con questo libro insieme a Vite Rubate di Vallelly ha inaugurato un interessante filone - speriamo destinato a continuare - di critica al neoliberismo).

[Kieran Telo · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed this very much and identified strongly with the arguments made by Cynthia Cruz and with her honesty and sincerity about how her life and work are essentially the same.

Here and there you can see where the parts of the text that were originally written for other media/audiences have been sutured, and occasionally this is a little jarring. But that’s the only minor criticism I’d make and, in any case, minor imperfections are a mark of beauty.

Like all the very best books this one has opened my eyes to other works worth pursuing, in particular the marvellous Savage Messiah by Laura Grace Oldfield, and several films that will be going on my watchlist eg High Life and Wanda.

I particularly liked the chapter on Clarice Lispector and the earlier material on Amy Winehouse. I’m not a fan of her music but felt I came to her understand her a little better after reading Cruz’s appreciative mini biography. Nice to see Mark Linkous appreciated too.

Recommended 100%

[Keen Reader · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Middle-class liberals want to make cosmetic, and not systemic, changes to the system – without interrupting or engaging with structures of oppression. You see this in contemporary progressives, whose proposals for change are superficial and do not interrupt or engage with the structures of oppression.”

I thought that the opening essay which focused largely on the music and lyrics of Paul Weller to be excellent, and was impressed by how well she captured the essence of his lyrics and intentions, especially with her being American and Weller never being anywhere as popular or well-known there as he is his in his native UK.

Elsewhere she dives deep into Barbara Loden’s “Wanda” and Joanna Hogg’s “The Souvenir” finding a lot of stuff about class. Her Laura Grace Ford's “Savage Messiah” as well as quoting liberally from the likes of Freud, Marx, Zizek, Bourdieu and Lacan.

I really liked what she was saying about the symbolic death of the working class, and that tired old mantra from the usual suspects about class not existing, but then it’s worth asking yourself who really benefits from such a myth?...and who suffers as a result?...basically if there’s no social classes there can be no working classes, and if they don't exist you never have to acknowledge or engage with them. And so to put it in neoliberal terminology-there are now only winners and losers.

This got its hooks into me straight from the opening page, Cruz makes so many great points about class and in particular the usually ignorant and passive-aggressive ways in which the middle-classes tend to relate to or react against the working classes.

A mild criticism would that this could be have been more tightly edited as there was just a little too much repetition and for the record, Ian Curtis didn’t grow up in the Thatcher era, she got into power two months before he turned 23 and he only saw the first year of Thatcherism before taking his own life in May 1980.

[Vic · Rating 3 out of 5]

È un saggio/memoir interessante che parla dell’occultamento di un cadavere, quello della working class: più la borghesia la nega, la cancella, più essa continua a riapparire, diventa un pensiero ricorrente che torna a galla anche se consciamente la si reprime.

Più che di lutto, a dirla tutta, qui si parla di melanconia, della sofferenza per un oggetto perduto che però non è morto davvero. Si parla infatti di chi, nonostante le origini working class, per talento o fortuna emerge, trova visibilità, guadagna soldi e in qualche modo diventa un transfuga di classe. Sostanzialmente, per l’autrice, le strade sono due: o si nasconde il proprio passato (l’accento, gli studi in scuole mediocri, il non aver mai fatto una vacanza, i modi di vestire e di pensare) e ci si fa assimilare alla borghesia – col rischio di perdere quella spinta e quell’unicità che ha portato artisti e intellettuali a costruirsi una voce – o si implode, si annega in questa contraddizione e si finisce male (suicida come Mark Linkous o Ian Curtis, distrutta da anoressia e bulimia come Amy Winehouse). Dopo esserci separati dalle nostre origini, anche se vi facciamo ritorno, la frattura iniziale causata dalla partenza crea una fessura, una ferita che non si rimargina.

Seppur sostenuta da un approccio fortemente psicanalitico, mi è sembrata meno a fuoco la pars construens, la via alternativa a quella percorsa dai tanti che hanno dovuto/voluto soccombere. Per l'autrice la consapevolezza di essere chi si è, il rifiuto di ignorare sminuire e occultare le proprie origini basta già a cambiare le cose, a trovare un equilibrio - come se fosse facile rifiutare di vivere all'interno di un sistema capitalistico come il nostro.

Vorrei, per il mio bene prima di tutto, sapere che una terza via esiste davvero, ecco.

[Ellie · Rating 5 out of 5]

sosososo good. fav quotes:

The town we lived in and the schools I attended were middle-class, and though i was never conscious of this, i imagined that my living amongst the middle class would somehow make me middle class too. [...] but beyond this, too, the world was middle class; the schools i attended, the people in my neighborhoods, the shops and institutions we visited, my friends and teachers. But beyond this, too, the world was middle-class, is middle-class: films and television shows, music, books, artwork, fashion, manners, and values--everything around me was (and still is) middle class.

In other words: class is not simply about money and one's profession---it is also about the invisible, unseen facets of capital. When my boyfriend said he couldn't marry me because we were from different classes, he wasn't necessarily talking about money or material goods (though this was also true.) What he was also alluding to were these invisible markers of privilege I would remain ignorant to for my entire adult life.

None of these class divides were apparent to me at the time---that, for instance, the only friends I had in high school were also from working class backgrounds, that the only boys who liked me were also from the working class. Rather, it is to say that there was something unsaid beneath that drew us to each other, something unsaid.

Though leaving one's working class home does, necessarily, result in a type of death---of the self of the actual day-to-day experience of living in one's working class community among one's family, friends, neighbors, shops, community centers, objects, and landscape--when we carry this world within us, we can, in some sense, preserve who we are.

[Dearwassily · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not a perfect book, not even close. There were flaws and gaps in the analysis—conflating the middle class with the ruling class is a common one that I see others have already mentioned—and while there were sections I wish had more depth or more grounding, overall this book made me think, and it articulated ideas I’ve been mulling over (such as how do we extricate ourselves from the neoliberal cesspool that is our current society and how do we connect with others in authentic ways when neoliberalism makes everything a capitalist transaction?) far more eloquently than I’ve been able to.

[Sara Sa · Rating 5 out of 5]

È la voce che avevamo perduto, quando il progresso ha deciso che le classi sociali non esistevano più. È riappropriarsi della propria coscienza per vedere ed essere visti. Un saggio analitico e profondo, attraverso le storie di artisti e un po' di storia personale. Non per chi cerca un romanzo, anche se la partenza sembra quella. Da leggere, rileggere e applicare

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a superb description of the soul annihilation that awaits those of us who somehow manage to escape the grips of poverty and the working class and “make it” to the middle class. It’s brilliant, insightful and depressing.

[Sara Opipari · Rating 5 out of 5]

E' molto difficile per me scrivere di una cosa che mi è piaciuta tanto. Almeno non sono ancora pronta.

:)

[Laura Pengwyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a good book to reflect about social classes, especially cause "they don't exist anymore!11!1", and neoliberalism. I didn't like the use of different social classes interchangeably (middle class, bourgeois, ruling class), why did she do that? Especially if she wanted to underline the existence of them, it'd be better to classify, specify, etc., their differences. Then, I'm pretty much perplexed about certain analysis of behaviors, things...

[Ach Kabal · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a huge bummer and took me so long to get through, but guess what! being working class is a huge bummer and i feel so much more at home in my body having read it.

[Joey · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is exactly my type of book/writing. I believe this fits under the auto-theory genre, but really what we get here is a fusion of critical theory, philosophy, music journalism, and personal stories. Fusing her own experience with the ghosts of her life such as Paul Weller, Ian Curtis, and Barbara Loden- we get something really special.

Cruz's background as a poet really shines through in this book. Her poetic phrasing gives The Melancholia of Class a sort of beauty and eloquence rarely found in the realm of theory. Influenced in part by Mark Fisher, his ability to bridge the gap between pop culture and the polemic haunts the text.

Speaking of haunting, the notion of ghosts are the main motif/metaphor running through this book. The book sets out to explore how the working class has been banished to a sort of spectral world by the middle/ruling class. Not quite a manifesto in a traditional sense, but the writing is just as punchy and haunting as anything by Marx. Plenty of one-liners that stick with you...

Excellent. my favorite book of 2021.

[Elena · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quanto può essere straniante rendersi conto di aver perso le proprie radici ma non averle piantate realmente da nessuna altra parte? Quanto può far male sentirsi perennemente estranei, a casa e nella nostra nuova posizione sociale? Le classi sociali esistono ancora ma la loro negazione non fa che renderci tutt* molto più sol*. Chi come Cruz appartiene alla working class da sempre e ora si sente in un limbo tra working class e classe media/borghesia e chi, come me e tant* altr*, proveniamo dalla classe media ma nella vita adulta facciamo parte della working class (senza però averne assorbito sentimenti, riferimenti, azioni). Lo straniamento è profondo ma può forse essere mitigato dalla consapevolezza di essere un tutt'uno, una classe (appunto) che può lottare per sconfiggere il sistema.

[teresavanpelt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quando mi sono laureata in Scienze Politiche guardavo i miei compagni di corso e mi sembrava di sentire la stessa vergogna provata a otto anni quando cercavo di abbellire al meglio la posizione lavorativa di mio padre certa che prima o poi tutti mi avrebbero scoperta: l'infanzia in un paesotto del nord borghese, la gioventù in mezzo a borghesi o poveri cristi intenti ad assimilare quanto più possibile il modello pronti ad occupare posizioni di spicco. La vergogna poi è diventata rabbia, rifiuto, rimorso, senso di incompletezza per poi trasformarsi in piena coscienza di classe. Questo libro parla esattamente di questo e non lo scorderò mai più.

[Alexander Pyles · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books dealing with class that I have ever read. It helps that Cruz speaks from such an intimate perspective, but her precision with identifying the impulses of the ruling/middle class and other modern and post-modern issues - it makes this book required reading for anyone with interest in this area.

I would say this goes doubly for those who come from blue-collar/working class/poor classes as well since it helped me articulate a lot of the discomfort and dissociation I've felt as I've been assimilated into the middle class.

[Mila · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really beautiful and evocative read that will haunt me for a long time. Maybe I am not the right person to critique this book, but somehow it resonated on a deeply visceral level, through the images of ghosts and ruins and nomadism it invoked to describe alienation in neoliberal societies.

Also, it made me see the Souvenir in a new light - I zoned out during that movie but might give it another try.

[Thomas Kingston · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating and deeply personal exploration of what being working class is like - and how it has changed under the current mode of production. Cruz weaves film, art, literature and biography into a landscape of melancholia and apathy - and in this diagnosis I feel there lies hope. Well worth a read

[Mariachiara Montera · Rating 5 out of 5]

Che libro utile per aprire gli occhi su chi siamo: working class o borghesia, e come le nostre origini ci influenzano nell’abitare un mondo dove il neoliberismo non accoglie la diversità autentica.

[Benji Rust · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Melancholia of Class examines how the frame of social class has been sidelined and removed from mainstream cultural discourse, and what this means for working class artists and intellectuals. Cruz convincingly makes the case that the working class has been symbolically erased by neoliberalism, which is the root of the melancholia she discusses, through the prism of various cultural figures that are personally relevant to her. This is the great merit of the book and why it is worth reading.

There are obviously weaknesses, and ones that go deeper than the repetitive nature of some of the prose or the minor but irritating historical inaccuracies (Cruz appears to have her timelines rather muddled. Punk in its ‘original rendition’ was hardly a reaction to Thatcher, which it pre-dated by at least three years, and Ian Curtis did not grow up during the Thatcher era, but took his own life barely over a year after her election as prime minister.)

Chief among the more significant weaknesses is the absence of any analysis of what constitutes social class. What informs Cruz’s thesis is a Bourdieusian and Freudian analysis, taking in Mark Fisher and Walter Benjamin along the way. While all of these intellectuals offer valuable insights into the various superstructural manifestations of social class, it is arguable whether any get to the heart of it. Bourdieu’s ideas about the key significance of ‘cultural capital’ are well illustrated in numerous examples by Cruz and undoubtedly offer some understanding of the ‘ease’ with which the bourgeoisie assume cultural superiority, but when Cruz writes that “It is through these seemingly inconsequential nuances that class is experienced”, this, in keeping with Bourdieu, removes class from the point of production and the shared experience of exploitation.

When Cruz does stray into more political rather than cultural analysis, there is further confusion, as when she suggests that the Democratic Party was once the party of the American working class. Despite this, the merits of the book and its intention outweigh the drawbacks, and in the concluding chapter Cruz at least attempts to address how we might break out of the melancholia, when she writes “There are so many of us, all of us waiting. If we came together, who knows what we could do.”

[Samantha Conte · Rating 4 out of 5]

if you have eating disorders, i highly recommend you NOT to read this book. I’ll go further into this later. so moving on: i need to give this book 4 stars and not less because it’s powerful, makes real many feelings that i’m sure a lot of readers could not define before, and it’s a book that people need to read. Also, the writing is nice, well-crafted, humble, and incisive. but there are many problems.

1) no clear definition of class, middle class, working class, etc
2) any reference to race, gender identity, to feminism (this last is mentioned only once saying that Wanda was “criticized by feminists” like wtf does that mean) and i feel that this is a big issue because she’s not talking to and of a huge huge portion of poor, outcasts, minorities and marginalized groups. Especially when talking about artists, she never mentions any of this about them
2) too little call to action imo and sometimes repetitive
3) i feel like what she talks about, the melancholia and all, is real af, however, she erases all mental struggles
4) the main issues i have with this book, for which i’d like to give less than 4 stars but i won’t, it’s the iper problematic depictions and descriptions of anorexia. It’s like she romanticizing and glorificating it, portraying it as a choice and not as a goddamn mental disorder. Ugh. Painful to read.

However, i underlined many passages, and it’s not an easy task to talk about stuff like this. It’s a book needed and which I recommend.

[Nelliamoci · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cosa significa davvero diventare qualcuno?
La borghesia ce l'ha insegnato fin troppo bene, o così ci racconta Cynthia Cruz in questo saggio - memoir.
Condividendo la sua esperienza personale, fino ad arrivare a Ian Curtis, Amy Winehouse e diversi scrittori, scrittici e cineasti degli anni Settanta e Ottanta, questi capitoli raccontano con lucidità il sentirsi intrappolati fra due mondi: quello in cui si è nati e quello in cui si tenta di entrare.
In questo caso, sono rispettivamente la working class e la classe sociale più abbiente, quella che chi studia partendo dal basso pensa a un certo punto di poter raggiungere.
Ma sono le persone del potere a creare le classificazioni e spesso non c'è modo di potersi muovere fra queste, pur pensando di vivere in un contesto ormai aperto e fluido (o così vorrebbe farti credere il sistema neoliberale).
È una lettura che, nonostante l'argomento molto tosto, riesce ad essere leggera, portando tantissimi spunti di riflessione e ulteriore analisi.
La melanconia pervade ogni pagina e ogni vita di chi, rincorrendo un sogno o un ideale di crescita, si ritrova poi a diventare uno spettro: non più parte del suo passato, non più possibile abitante di un futuro differente.

[Claudia Palmas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hanno ammazzato la working class, la working class è viva

Questo saggio di Cynthia Cruz fa il paio con "Non è un pranzo di gala. Indagine sulla letteratura working class" di Alberto Prunetti. Un saggio, quello della Cruz, che è anche un memoir con incursioni lacaniane e freudiane, agganciate alla narrazione e all'analisi delle vite e delle opere prodotte da artisti provenienti appunto dagli strati sociali più poveri.

È la descrizione di una situazione esistenziale assai comune in cui si trova chi, e questo lo scorgo anche in Ernaux, ma pure in Lenù dell'Amica Geniale, si trova in un limbo: ha abbandonato la working class e si è avvicinato alla classe media. Ma questa classe non l'accoglie, non del tutto, perché non è possibile, essendo un mondo con regole e paradigmi a parte, venir assimilati. E se e quando ciò accade, è come morire, per rubare le parole a Mark Fisher. E così irrompe la melanconia, un sentirsi monchi, abbandonati da qualcosa di impalpabile, di incorporeo. Un lutto simbolico che non si può elaborare perché tale non è.

[Giorgio Palumbo · Rating 4 out of 5]

un libro che ha tutto per essere importante.
Il fine, del libro, è illustrare come chi proveniente dalla working class faccia di tutto per cancellare il proprio patrimonio genetico sociale per ritrovarsi in un mondo neoliberista di cui non comprende effettivamente il senso e in cui non trova un ruolo, pur avendone i mezzi.
La scrittrice dissezionando esempi famosi come Mark Linkous, Paul Weller, Amy Winehouse, Ian Curtis, Jason Molina e Clarice Lispector segue questo filo comune di melanconia per cui il distacco dalle proprie origini porta a danni e a una melanconia perenne.
La domanda che pone il tutto, e la scrittrice con questo libro è “perché sopprimere qualcosa che è parte di noi e fare finta che non esista, perché non farne un punto di forza”.
Ecco, sarebbe bello trovare una risposta. Intanto il libro aiuta a farsi questa domanda.

[Sophy H · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an interesting read by Cruz, using the backdrop of English music bands from the 70's/80's and various other artists to highlight the issue of being working class and its ramifications.

I did have a few problems with her writing though. There was a lot of repetition, with the author going over and over certain points unnecessarily, and labouring other phrases such as "I felt shame", "I felt terrible shame".

The class debate to me (as a born working class UK-er) is an interesting one and I find reading about it very engaging. Cruz's offering here is good, but a little limited in scope and reductive even. It's funny as well how she has lived mostly in the US but references the UK so heavily in her study.

Anyway, it was a good read and kept my interest but definitely not one I'd return to in the future, so I'm donating to my community book exchange.