AMY ROSE: When did you become aware of hierarchies of class and your place in them? Was there a specific moment when you began to understand yourself as richer/poorer than others? For me, it was when I was about nine—that year, my mom cried when I asked her to buy me a paperback that she couldn’t afford, but also got upset when the well-meaning people in our rich suburb left groceries and gift cards to department stores in our mailbox. It was also when I realized that the electricity wasn’t constantly being turned off at my friends’ places.

SUZY: I think I was six or seven. My mom would sometimes send me to school without lunch money; as an immigrant she didn’t know that there were free or reduced-price meals available to low-income students. She bought me and my sister school uniforms that were too big on us so they’d last through a couple of growth spurts. I think children carry class bias too, even though they don’t know any better—I got bullied out of a pool once because the kids noticed that I’d had the same faded swimsuit for years.

DYLAN: My best friend in grade school lived in subsidized housing with her young single mom in her 20s, while I lived in a mansion just four blocks away with two rich parents and a nanny. Her apartment had this distinct smell that as a kid I associated with APARTMENT; I would later realize that it was just the smell of many people living in close quarters and cooking food in their kitchens and throwing out their trash. My current apartment smells like this constantly, and it makes me nostalgic for my friend’s old place.

JULIANNE: I remember becoming aware of poverty and generosity when I was five, going grocery shopping with my grandma. She was always on the lookout for for the cheapest deals on food, but she spent the quarter she had left to buy me an Archie comic. She couldn’t read or write, and she lived off Social Security and selling tortillas by the dozen, but she knew I loved those comics.

ROSE: A really formative moment for me was when I was about six. My dad left a pile of cash on the counter to pay our nanny for the week. I took some twenties out of the pile and kept them for myself. When the nanny went to count the money, it wasn’t the right amount, and everyone was awkwardly confused and quietly alarmed. My dad gently asked me if I took it (probably because I am a terrible liar and was most likely slinking around like the guiltiest creature alive) and I fessed up. It was the first time I remember understanding that you can’t just take things just because you want them; it was also the first time I FULLY understood that my parents paid people to help them, that the monetary exchange I had witnessed created a particular power dynamic between humans, and that my parents had more power in that arrangement.

PIXIE: I thought we were rich because we could afford brand-name soda as opposed to generic soda.

CHANEL: I had free/reduced lunch in elementary school and thought it was some kind of cool perk. Around the same time, I isited Louisiana for a family reunion and saw the literal “other side of the tracks”: There was a geographic dividing line between races, and the white part of town was cleaner and prettier.


AMY ROSE: Was it important for your family to “keep up appearances” in order to be perceived as “above” their class?

SUZY: My mom put EVERYTHING into her appearance. I think she knew she’d be more successful if she had nice clothes. She was absolutely right—she was able to secure jobs by looking very clean and professional all the time. But her reasoning was also that, as a kid, I could easily wear school uniforms or stuff from the thrift store and just deal with it. Then in high school, when thrift stores and DIY were becoming really trendy, I felt really resentful of the upper-middle-class girls who acted like it was this really new and cool thing. These were the very same girls who had looked down on me for wearing that stuff a year before.

JULIANNE: My mom DID NOT want me to wear thrift-store clothing, because she had to wear it growing up and hated the idea of either of us wearing secondhand stuff when we could afford new clothes from K-Mart. (K-Mart had its own class implications; I remember being in fourth grade and people saying, “You shop at K-Mart!” as a dis.) She also made sure we had a SUPER nice house—clean, well put together—partly out of pride, but also to put forth a façade based on shame, which I have spent sooooo much time in therapy talking about. LOL.

SUZY: We didn’t have people over much, because my mom would freak OUT every time. She hosted a party for her co-workers once when I was a teen, and she made me scrub the bathroom with copious amounts of bleach. I got so sick I got chest pains and started wheezing. But she was just so, so scared of us looking dirty around her co-workers.

AMY ROSE: My mom flipped out if I brought my friends over and anything was out of place. She was worried about people in our community seeing us as poor ’n’ gross, I think. Even when we lived in a gross shack behind the Wendy’s or in a tiny duplex apartment, she was intent on keeping a “nice” home, and spent her money on things that made the insides of these places look like a middle-class family’s. She was obsessed with the term “shabby chic,” I think because it made her feel like it was sort of fashionable that our stuff was often secondhand.

JENNY: I always found it embarrassing that we kept plastic covers on everything—the TV remote, lamps, the dining table, the sofa—because my parents were like, “This has to last for the next 50 years.” I hated it when my friends would ask me why everything looked like it had not yet been unpacked from the box. A mean boy in my middle school once made fun of me for wearing shoes from Payless and the girl sitting behind me jumped to my defense and told my bully, “WELL YOU LOOK LIKE YOU GOT YOUR OUTFIT FROM THE DUMPSTER!” and I was hella embarrassed because the skirt I was wearing was actually from someone’s garbage bin! My parents would go trolling rich neighborhoods on garbage days to find clothes and furniture.

ARABELLE: After a certain age, I didn’t invite people over anymore. We didn’t have video games or cable, we had “old people” furniture—thrifted antique stuff—and my mother is Asian and we were poor, so we had like dumplings and rice and canned chili in the house but never, like, a Carvel ice cream cake for a birthday party.


PIXIE: Can you think of any behaviors (table manners, for example) that were instilled in you as a means of establishing your class?

SUZY: Saying please, thank you, and excuse me for EVERYTHING. But as someone who was a nanny and an RA at a fancy private school for years, I am still regularly shocked by how most of the wealthy people I’ve come across don’t say please or thank you…ever.

MAGGIE: I was taught: Never say please, but always say thank you. No one was more scorned than the nouveau riche who didn’t say thank you and didn’t treat their “help” well. Even at Taco Bell, my mom screams, “THANK Y’ALL!” to the entire kitchen staff. But you don’t say please to waiters or the “help,” because they’re not doing you a favor, they’re doing their jobs.

PIXIE: My mom was really anti-swearing and hated us using words like sucks and crap, even. We had to say crud. And she was not a fan of chewing gum. Her favorite saying was “Were you born in a barn?” and now I’m so mad that my childhood self never thought to come back with “No, but Jesus was!”

ARABELLE: I remember when I was like eight or nine and I visited a friend’s house for dinner for the first time and tried to help set the table. I didn’t know anything about place settings because I’d only eaten TV dinners out of their own containers for as long as I could remember. I didn’t know any table manners!

CHANEL: I didn’t eat a lot at other people’s houses because I didn’t want to appear greedy. I also learned to not reveal too much of my business, which I still don’t do (but also which LOL to everything I’ve written in this post).

KRISTA: You don’t ask for seconds at other people’s houses because it looks like you don’t get enough at home.

JAMIA: In boarding school we had to clear the table and set it for formal dinners. They chose who you sat with so you could learn how to make small talk with different kinds of people. I hated it! It felt like we were in training for dinner-party hostessing. My school was started by bluestocking feminists, so the irony was always interesting to me.

GABBY: I am a really messy eater and have to be really conscious to look neat while I eat. Also, one time I felt really embarrassed at a nice restaurant because they started to clear an appetizer plate away and I pulled my fork off of it so I’d have a fork to eat my entree with because THAT’S WHAT YOU DO AT APPLEBEE’S and the waiter was like, “Um, we’ll give you another fork?” and looked at me funny.

PIXIE: Which is why now I just eat pizza all day because fuck that, no forks needed.