[8] In her late twenties, she lived in Port Townsend, Washington, where she had her first child and became a single mother who worked maid service jobs to support her family.
The first line of her debut book Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive (2019) reads: "My daughter learned to walk in a homeless shelter.
[12] Upon graduating from the University of Montana,[15] Land ended her dependence on food stamps,[16] started working as a freelance writer, and became a writing fellow with the Center for Community Change.
[12] Barack Obama placed the book on his "Summer Reading List" of 2019[20] and actress Reese Witherspoon said she "loved this story about one woman surviving impossible circumstances.
[22] In USA Today, Sharon Peters praised the book's honesty, writing that it's filled "with much candid detail about the frustrations with the limitations of programs she relied on.
It’s one woman’s story of inching out of the dirt and how the middle class turns a blind eye to the poverty lurking just a few rungs below—and it’s one worth reading.
"[24] On the other hand, Nancy Rommelmann from Newsday asserted, "Land may be living on one side of the divide while trying to get to the other — she badly wants to become a writer and writes during the margins of time she has available — but her method of calling close attention to personal affronts can grow wearying.
"[41] Nelson Lichtenstein, reviewing Class for The New York Times, writes that "Land bares her soul and psyche, offering readers a look at her inner life with excruciating honesty.
"[42] Lorraine Barry, writing for the Los Angeles Times, criticizes Land's sophomore memoir, noting that "[a] more complete tale would surely involve anger — which is perhaps a more honest word than 'resilience' in explaining the drive to succeed in the face of horrendous barriers.
"[43] Kirkus Reviews also notes the anger in the book while still recommending it: "Though she is a successful writer, she harbors a surprising amount of rancor about her rejection from Montana’s graduate creative writing program.
In a survey of women’s memoirs written in the wake of the 2016 MeToo movement, Leigh Gilmore notes that Maid “contributes to a missing archive of knowledge.
Land uses life narrative to cast a steady gaze—empathetic, self-aware, feminist—on the invisibility of white working poor mothers and the stigma they face as they struggle to secure a stable life for their children.”[45] Roseanne Kennedy explores Maid and the This American Life episode “Three Miles” through the lens of “domestic humanitarianism,” a term she has coined to describe the “cultural turn toward humanitarian rhetorics, ad hoc gestures, and individual solutions to supplement the nation’s failure to provide adequately for its citizens and residents in the face of widening economic disparity.” Kennedy argues that works like Maid may distract readers from larger, systemic problems of inequity, inadvertently preventing necessary collective work for economic justice.
[46] Drawing on Kennedy’s work, Katrina Powell considers the ways that Land’s memoir can be viewed as “testimony,” noting that “it is critical to understand the form, function, reception, and contexts of particular testimonies.” Powell agrees with Kennedy’s argument that tropes like “needy victim” and “heroic rescuer” can distract from a larger discussion of societal failure to provide sustainable livelihoods for all citizens.
[47] Discussing the release of the Netflix series based on Land's memoir in her review of working class narratives, Kathy Newman writes that “Maid is an outlier in television on a number of counts.
[53] Land has spoken openly about the stigma of receiving government assistance and the assumptions people had of her when she was relying on food stamps.