A magazine owed me $ 900. By the time I got paid, I was ruined.
CHILDREN, WE'RE GETTING A BOOK DEAL. MAYBE!
I was perfectly fine being Barbara Genova. Keeping my head down, doing the work, filing stories like a professional writer.
And then.
One missed payment: an invoice falling through the cracks. That's all it took for me to plunge into what felt and to a large extent is unrecoverable poverty.
A magazine owed me nine hundred dollars. It was - is - a lot of money. It was a lot of money for people in different fields. I wasn't leaving nine hundred dollars on the table anytime soon, but it's also money I needed to live.
Not getting it for months meant that by the time I got paid I had had to borrow money from a blood relative in order to buy food. Before that, I had made do without what you would consider essential goods and services for a long time.
It’s not for me to know if the clusterfuck happened because my late supervisor messed up or because someone else went, hey let's skip payday for contractors and vendors!, or maybe it was all a whimsical misunderstanding: companies are not people, they move with a mind of their own.
Had I been treated unfairly from the get-go, I would have left (ehh, not worth the headache): but the individuals I dealt with, they were competent at what they did, and for a spell it was good. I was being paid often enough I could look around and see about getting more paid work. I could think about budgeting and improving. Strategically. Long-term.
And then.
Last time I sat down for a haircut, the cheapest in town, it was September and I had a job. I could maybe spend a little money to look clean. Not nice: clean. Normal. A person who sleeps in a room. My phone screen was cracked after falling to the floor one month earlier, but knowing how expensive a replacement might be, I postponed. I could hack it for a while. Not like I needed to show my phone around. To people.
Both are off the table now. A haircut is a luxury item I can't pay for. Replacing a phone, forget about it.
I look poor because I can't afford the price of upkeep.
All through the unpaid season, I kept making do. I had no credit on my phone, I hooked up to any hotspot I could find, never called, only texted. You can put credit on the broken phone when you get your money. I wore a headdress to cover my hair. I made a point to keep my everyday clothes clean. Wash them in cold water. Mass market detergent, small doses. Be decent. I kept my personal space reasonably neat as well. Decorum. It's a thing. I stuck to .99 shampoo.
Factor in the obvious humiliation, the anguish, the usual. Other than writers, who seem to all come from the same generational wealth tornado, most people know. Every morning you wake up wondering if today you will get what you're owed, dreading the fact it may not happen at all, every day you re-motivate yourself to be out there, make plans, double down, relaunch, reinvent, attract, query more, do something else. Take a long morning walk, walks are free! You don't have the money to take care of yourself, how can you write coherently enough to generate sellable pitches, assuming anyone ever gets back to you.
Writers are most certainly not in the business of spreading the love around, asking for contacts is met by dead silence, saying you need money gets you excommunicated from group chats.
You sink into the chair as well-meaning people say, they simply must pay you, give them time.
Does it sound familiar to you? Have you been there? Have you ever asked a supermarket cashier to please check the price for the garbage bags because you had to put them back if they were the expensive kind of garbage bags? The cashier went, how much can you afford here? 1.99 was too much for garbage bags.
February 2023 was an absolute banner month for getting the oh dear this woman must be a vagrant non-look at supermarket checkout stations. You hadn't seen March yet.
Of course, there’s the small-time indignity of watching it all go by – hundreds of tweets per day as you're hooked to a cafe wifi, staring and scrolling in real time at people who owe you money as they blithely post and post about Bitcoin. Any form of rage tastes hollow. All you can do is file it away. Man, fuck each and every last one of you. Promise you will be done soon. The minute I get paid I won't have to pretend *birth rates* merit further discussion, ever, again. Fuck out of here with that billionaire boys’ club nonsense.
There was a sharp acceleration to it all. In February a literary journal / micro press shut down with a tweet; the same happened two days later for a much bigger entity, leaving way more workers in the dust. Banks were failing in real time. What if –
Non-payment breaks people. It broke me for a spell. I was crumbling and throwing up – that hadn't happened in years, throwing up out of tension and despair, wondering how was I gonna climb out of this. As I hit send on a message outlining the situation, for the first time, I said it out loud. Cos'ho fatto.
What have I done.
The latest issue of SAND Journal can be found in the Librairie du Palais de Tokyo.
I've never been. Must be a magical place. It looks great, from a distance.
The fine-tune literary writing I came by honestly is now on sale in the bookshop of a museum whose ticket is a luxury item I won't be able to afford ever again.
Museum ticket: luxury item
Haircut: luxury item.
Movie ticket: luxury item
Office supplies : luxury items
Non-cracked phone screen: luxury item
You can't afford that.
I live surrounded by things I can't afford, things like putting money in the phone, getting my hair done, the constant reminder other people have a lot and other women married up, ensuring a spouse would pay for whatever lifestyle they care to adopt at any time. I get online and it's a million times worse. The Internet has become a nonstop stream of the American-born complaining about late capitalism and student loans, drip drip drip, learn their concerns, pretend they're yours; but they're not. You can't give them what they approve of, never mind consider paying for. You can't fake it.
Back in late December I called someone to say, I need you to give me permission to throw away the pair of ripped leggings I've made do with for two months now, because they can't be mended anymore and they're falling apart when I walk, and, I need permission to throw away the pajama top with burnt holes all across the back because it can't be worn anymore, nobody sees it but me, I do, and I think I deserve lying down to sleep in rags now.
I swore I was going to buy cheap leggings and new nylons when I got in a better place that never materialized.
When you get there, you already cut expenses. Stuff like streaming subscriptions or nail polish are long gone by. You already make do with almost nothing. You already postponed home repairs to when it gets a little bit better.
You are past pocketing single-serving packets of sugar from the cafe countertop (to do what); getting one cup of coffee with three sweeteners to boost the blood sugar up (doesn't work, get food); all the general store restrooms don't have toilet paper rolls anymore. (Poor people steal them, don't you know!) I also can't sell plasma in the country I live in, otherwise, it's not even a question. Take my blood, please.
Rest assured I was always the austere one, the younger woman who couldn't afford an iPhone and didn't have a wealthy boyfriend who'd buy it for her as a gift just because, but I was secretive about the state of my personal finances because – thrilling double flashback, split this screen in half right here: back then if you had more than a couple dollars to your name you would be considered an amateur, somebody who didn't need to be compensated for their labor after all, but then, there was a pervasive hope things could improve against all odds, my frugal mindset would be somehow vindicated by the work paying off in the long run.
In poverty, things never get fixed. The money, the math. It's just not there. You go without more and more until you fade.
In early January I had a dull yellow post-it on the bedroom wall with optimistic! notes, two or three items I was going to buy once I was in a better place! scribbled on it, things like Lush face cream and nylons and makeup that now have blazed past me in an irreversible fashion.
Am I mortified I ever put that post-it on the wall.
By the time I got paid, none of the above was an option.
Who did you think you were.
Did you think you had a way out.
Poor woman.
You're so stupid.
Nonpayment is a bleak place. You wait. Tons of waiting.
Getting fired means you must start looking or training for a new job; being ignored by people who owe you money is a boilerplate form of control over vendors. You're worth so little, why should we bother paying you.
Sometimes the people who stonewall you are salaried staff, under contract; sometimes they've been tasked with ignoring you, stating they will forward the request to management; you are the day laborer they weren't even supposed to pick up from the parking lot. Every inconvenience a round stone hitting you square in the neck.
You start blacking out on your worth as a worker because you can lose sight of how much time and effort it took you to produce the unpaid work. Was it a day? Days? Hours?
The way it goes, usually, is you start begging people via email as you watch them debate the future of currency; you speak to an attorney who confirms you have a case; then you make universal lawyer noises; then you starve some more, then you get paid.
All the while, there's the flat thud of watching other writers display their cute little outfits, their hairdos, their rows of beauty products, their meticulously arranged work stations, boasting about their hundreds of paying customers and the cool writing events they attend.
Gee but it's hard when one's crouching somewhere to turn out copy between panic attacks and refusing to look at one's bank balance 1.
Several times I slipped into the mother tongue. Which, if you're new to me, is the surefire sign there are cracks in the pavement and they're gaining on whoever's struggling to establish a narrative tone. A palate. The rational, sleek American brain is drowned out by two hundred years of hunger past present and future.
Speriamo di morire presto – here's hoping I will die soon enough – speriamo di morire prima – here's hoping I will die before it comes to that – before I lose the house, before I have to choose between electricity or food again, before yet another stone hits me in the head and takes me out of commission, some woman in a frozen house going (ahh I'm done, motherfuckers didn't pay).
I haven't had flesh-and-blood suicidal urges in a long time, so that dull demon is done with, but what I have a deeper familiarity with is suicide planning as a sensible alternative to death by a hundred privations, and that one’s been in the picture yet again. If I kill myself, I won't have to worry about money any longer. Worst case scenario, I can show myself out. Spare me the drama of going to bed angry and waking up in fright.
It took me about three months to get paid in full: when it finally happened, I had fallen off the freelance carousel. No money, no buzz. Limited means to start over, again, with the massive caveat my payments might never arrive.
People are gonna think you're lazy. People are gonna think you're not serious. Can't you get gigs? Don't you want to work? Why, with all the credits you racked up, isn't anyone paying you ?
It's true that contacts and published work generate contacts and published work, there is something to the notion of a person carrying an “unproductive aura” as a halo, not because of any spiritual inadequacy, but because they've been beaten into dumb, mute non-production by a lack of food, income and opportunities.
One missed payment is enough to set you back months when not years in terms of motivation, productivity 2 and overall drive.
What it did to me, I got motivated and spiteful enough to see if I could get a book deal going.
Oh I could. Maybe.
Interesting.
Tell us more.
The last time I was non-paid, I was much younger and more impulsive, capable of feeling injustice: humiliation in the shape of a sting; it was easier to fight a shoddy enterprise that would develop a reputation for screwing people over, and, to the best of my knowledge, never bothered to pay many others, just left them in the lurch.
Having lived a quiet faceless life after a severely different one, I was sitting on some material. You can say that. I had also developed the situational awareness not to throw it out just to see who bites 3 . I reached out to the only person I trusted to keep a private meeting private, without making a sad production out of it. Nobody knows about this, I said.
- So you're in a mental place where you're scheduling Zoom calls and later in-person appointments with the head of a publishing company as you're cursing the last employer who choked you out to the point you wouldn't buy a paper notebook.
- Yes.
- When is the moment you turn things around?
- Never.
I did, however, say to the publisher, unprompted, I'm gonna fix the face, I know a doctor who can give me Botox shots. Him being a better man than some, the remark fell by the wayside, pragmatic concerns taking its place. Can we schedule a book for when, potentially?
What I meant was, dude trust me, I will do the beauty work necessary to be a woman author – I'll get the hair done, I will buy makeup, I don't know how, I will sell the furniture, I'll come up with something, I will re-animate my whole body so as to strike the balance of haunted and poised necessary to get the Literary stamp.
I will not look poor.
I own one good miniskirt, one good long-sleeved shirt. One semi-intact pair of sneakers. One good winter coat. I can fake it for an hour and thirty-nine minutes.
Brick-and-mortar publishing company, fine imprint, becoming an author in their roster, something I never quite had the wherewithal or the skills necessary to achieve in the back before: a place in a decent catalog, the genuine in, the possibility of cultivating a medium- to long-term relationship, future projects and all, with a company more or less made of people who respect their mission statement and budget.
It's the dream, to some. My books. Like Capa when he says my bomb.
I can work fast enough if there’s money on the line and I can be sellable enough to get in the book writing business (classy auto-fiction division) and I'm so broke I can't buy a single book. Not now. Square that up for me. If I do sign a deal, I will be paid (x) amount of money to produce and eventually promote an object I can't afford. Another luxury item of many.
Short of announcing I am well below the poverty line and making other people grudgingly cater to my needs, how am I going to promote this? How much money am I gonna spend to look worthy of resurrection, your girl fresh back from the dead?
I was happy writing longform essays, and, to a shocking degree, I would still rather write longform essays. I would be satisfied with the work.
Trouble is, longform has become a format for the mega-rich. A playground for the wealthy with a taste for admiration. And if everything exists to please the rich and indulge their latest whims, your chance of producing marketable longform work can only get slimmer. You're out of step.
Meanwhile, you are made to bet on increasingly unfavorable odds. If this one fails, then I will have nothing to bounce back to. Must decide between focusing on the book and setting up a network of collateral side hustles in case the book doesn't pop.
When are you going to lose the house?
Have you checked on the food banks yet?
(Yes.)
The poorer you get, as a woman, the more of a mark you become.
The day before I met the publisher my teeth started to hurt. I was chugging over-the-counter painkillers instead of going to the dentist. Maybe it will go away. Shut up about it. Smile. Be nice.
The day after I met the publisher, I was presented with sudden, extensive repairs to my laptop that threatened to set me back 250 euros – which I did not have. I asked for help in another storefront of the same retail chain. I got the minor repair done on the house, my initial fee refunded, and a wholly unnecessary performance of our sincere apologies for the misunderstanding. I moved fast because I had to get my laptop back, repairs or no repairs. I need it for work. I would have plugged away at a broken keyboard until a book was somehow produced.
But this was new, too. I had never been swindled when it came to tech maintenance. Something in the way I carried myself made it look like a possibility. Yeah, lady, you will pay us more, we will give you back your stuff whenever.
My house needs repairs I can't arrange for – broken sliding shower door – and every one of these, which I did shrug off as later concerns in a different season, hits like another click-stone chipping away at personal dignity, strength, the perception of life as salvageable.
I have no idea how I will survive, but since the last magazine job I had turned into a non-eating experience, I have limited choice but to roll the dice on my books. Like most Writers still want (still!) despite a vast majority acting like they're too cool for school and it's all a big joke anyway. So if I get a small advance here I can spend the money on extravagant items such as – a pair of nylons for next winter (I'm currently down to one with holes I need to learn how to mend).
I don't think I'll bounce back to the sunny girl-spirit I never was. Come on. I'm not sure I will ever have the disposable income necessary to replace a cracked phone at this point, because even if I do, even if I save up to replace the cracked phone, unless movie-deal cash shows up, there's bound to be another costly emergency rolling the doors open in the nonstop triage area.
I wonder if I will get back to a place where any amount of money is okay to spend on anything other than food. Probably not! Which makes me a thorny proposition as a culture producer myself. You're supposed to stun and amuse. Something's gotta give.
After the first round of notes for this story, with some difficulty, I've shelved a bought-used-for-20 handbag – the belt had gotten so damaged by wear and tear it would have cost me more money to replace it, again. And I've temporarily put away a pair of battered sneakers with near-visible holes on the tips. If I can learn how to sew them back to decent shape, then I shall.
What can I say there; at least I don't have student loans to bitch about?
The only word companies cannot pretend not to understand is “productivity”.
It's easier to daydream about bidding wars than living through a single round of a semi-competitive auction.
This story hits me right in the gut because I've dealt with similar non-payment issues in the past. I worked for a tiny startup doing tech coverage for a while (they were always great) and they had a syndication deal with one of the top news sites. After the startup shutdown some of my contacts from that larger site asked if I'd be interested in doing some freelance work. I said yes, because I needed the money and it was easy work.
Fast forward a few months and I'd racked up a bill of around $3,500, which had yet to be paid.
I was told it was in the works and I would be paid soon.
Another month goes by and people at the company start dropping. Layoffs and then a mass exodus. I'd contact one person, they'd promise I'd be paid soon, and by the time I checked back in with them in a few weeks they'd be gone.
Between each person, I'd spend a week just trying to figure out who to contact. Who even knew that I was owed money? Was there even any record of it at this point?
This stretched on for over two years.
When I was finally paid, I had already gone through roughly a dozen people who promised I'd be paid within a month. Each time, I had to explain to an entirely new person who I had never met before that they owed me thousands of dollars. I'd have to provide email logs and records of my work. Each person strung me along just long enough for to buy time so they could leave the company, never passing on my situation to anyone, but locking it away in their now-defunct email.
Things got incredibly tight for a while, and I often wanted to just give up. The hours I spent trying to get paid outweighed the amount of time I'd spent on the actual work by a factor of 10 or more.
Looking back, I probably could have taken some kind of legal action, but I had no idea what I was doing at the time, and freelancing leaves you so incredibly powerless in many instances.
Anyway, this was a great story Barbara. Thank you for sharing.
Great headline -- sucked me right in!