Near the end of Lori Fox’s memoir, the author has a realization that reshapes their perspective on the working class.
“If the rich will not give us what is ours—if they will not pay us fairly, if they will not let us eat what we grow, live in the houses we build, and use the energy, goods, and services our hands and feet create in ways that allow us to live good honest lives—what if we made them,” reads an excerpt of This Has Always Been a War, which is Fox’s first book after years of working in journalism telling the stories of others.
Fox’s book provides both a candid and introspective look at some of the author’s darkest moments, writing of carrying an empty beer bottle in their purse for protection, as well as the sexual harassment experienced over nearly two decades.
The book also looks at how much the working class lose to wage theft and injustices in the serving industry. As Fox explains how starting work 15 minutes early without pay comes out to a loss of 60 paid hours each year.
One aspect of the serving industry Fox explored in depth was the origins around tipping, that “creates income inequality between front and back staff,” and how that is based in racism.
“Tipping isn’t based on service,” Fox wrote. “It’s based on class and power.”
In an interview with rabble.ca, Fox explained that part of their goal in writing This Has Always Been a War was to share their distinctive stories in a way that readers of any identity could connect with.
“As a trans and queer writer, we often get pigeonholed into just writing this one specific thing, and something that I really strive for in my work is allowing my individual experiences to feel universally accessible,” Fox explained.
At their busiest, Fox found themself writing anywhere from 10,000 to 20,000 words per week between the memoir and their reporting job.
The idea came together rapidly, as Fox prepared a pitch in under a week. They credit the proposal’s quick success to Fox’s viral op-ed, “I’m one of the service workers who left the restaurant industry during the pandemic. Serve Yourself”, published by The Globe and Mail in Aug. 2021.
“This is a book that cost me a lot, emotionally and physically,” Fox said, noting they recently experienced a nervous breakdown due to both “a lack of access to proper care” and, perhaps more significantly, “the sheer mental strain of producing something so incredibly personal while trying to be a working class person.”
Part of Fox’s struggle with penning this memoir stemmed from how to write about difficult topics that touched on their lived experience, including being housing insecure, living in poverty, and navigating life as a queer and non-binary person.
Another challenge was the fact that some of those lived experiences are not all that far out of Fox’s rear-view mirror.
“I was homeless up until July 2019,” they explained, noting they interviewed Yukon’s housing minister about the territory’s housing shortage “while living in my van.”
One essay in This Has Always Been a War takes a critical look at feminist dystopian fiction, finding a troubling common theme, focusing “on the reproductive self as the essence of femininity.”
“There are so many of these books, and that they’ve been written all within a very defined timeline, and they define what it is to be a woman in a very narrow bracket,” Fox explained. “They define it as being a white middle class person who is capable of having children.”
For this reviewer, the most powerful essay in the book was “The Happy Family Game.” It’s about the idyllic nuclear fantasy of a Happy Family, that Fox explains comes packaged and sold as a dream for families to aspire to be.
“What the happy family does for capitalism is create a quantifiable structured family unit, that is both an item to desire and a way to ensure a standardized consumer base,” Fox explained. “Because it’s much easier to market to the nuclear family with have a mom and a dad and two kids, and everybody has the same sexual preferences, and this is the way that things should be.”
Instead of appealing to the customer, the “Happy Family” tells consumers “what they should want and how they should be.”
“Even as queer people, there’s the idea of having two people in a relationship, and then they have kids, and everything outside of that is somehow of less value than this internalized family unit,” Fox said, adding “it just creates these like little cubes that capitalism can stack and market to, and control.”
While This Has Always Been a War represents an intimate and personal assortment of the author’s life lessons and lived experiences, the overarching theme is about solidarity, something Fox makes clear in the dedication to their book:
“To the working class, who cook the meals and pick the fruit, who serve the tables and stock the shelves, who work the gigs and deliver the orders. We are the makers and builders of this world and all that is in it belongs to us.”
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