Published in 2020
352 pages
Lauren Sandler is an award-winning journalist. She is the bestselling author of One and Only: The Freedom of Having an Only Child, and the Joy of Being One and Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement. Her essays and features have appeared in dozens of publications, including Time, The New York Times, Slate, The Atlantic, The Nation, The New Republic, The Guardian, and New York. Sandler has led the OpEd Project’s Public Voices Fellowships at Yale, Columbia, and Dartmouth and has taught in the graduate journalism program at New York University, where she has also been a visiting scholar. Recently, she has been a Poynter Fellow at Yale and a Calderwood Fellow at MacDowell. She lives in Brooklyn.
What is this book about?
A riveting account of a year in the life of a young, homeless single mother, her quest to find stability and shelter in New York City—and the journalist who got too close while telling her story.
More than forty-five million Americans attempt to survive under the poverty line, day by day. Nearly 60,000 people sleep in New York City-run shelters every night—forty percent of them children. This Is All I Got makes this issue deeply personal, vividly depicting one woman’s hope and despair and her steadfast determination to improve her situation, despite the myriad setbacks she encounters.
Camila is a twenty-two-year-old new mother. She has no family to rely on, no partner, and no home. Despite her intelligence and determination, the odds are firmly stacked against her. Award-winning journalist Lauren Sandler tells the story of a year in Camila’s life—from the birth of her son to his first birthday—as she navigates the labyrinth of poverty and homelessness in America. As Camila attempts to secure a college education and a safe place to raise her son, she copes with dashed dreams, failed relationships, and miles of red tape with grit, grace, and resilience.
This Is All I Got is a dramatic story of survival and powerful indictment of a broken system, but it is also a revealing and candid depiction of the relationship between an embedded reporter and her subject and the tricky boundaries to navigate when it’s impossible to remain a dispassionate observer.
