This Is All I Got
A New Mother's Search for Home
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Narrated by:
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Lauren Sandler
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By:
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Lauren Sandler
About this listen
A New York Times Notable Book
From an award-winning journalist, a poignant and gripping immersion in the life of a young, homeless single mother amid her quest to find stability and shelter in the richest city in America
Long-Listed for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award
• “Riveting . . . a remarkable feat of reporting.”—The New York Times
Camila is 22 years old and a 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. In this extraordinary work of literary reportage, Lauren Sandler chronicles 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 New York City. In her attempts to secure a safe place to raise her son and find a measure of freedom in her life, Camila copes with dashed dreams, failed relationships, the desolation of abandonment, and miles of red tape with grit, humor, and uncanny resilience.
Every day, more than 45 million Americans attempt to survive below the poverty line. Every night, nearly 60,000 people sleep in New York City-run shelters, 40 percent of them children. In This Is All I Got, Sandler brings this deeply personal issue to life, vividly depicting one woman's hope and despair and her steadfast determination to change her life despite the myriad setbacks she encounters.
This Is All I Got is a rare feat of reporting and a dramatic story of survival. Sandler’s candid and revealing account also exposes the murky boundaries between a journalist and her subject when it becomes impossible to remain a dispassionate observer. She has crafted a powerful and unforgettable indictment of a system that is often indifferent to the needs of those it serves, and that sometimes seems designed to fail.
Praise for This Is All I Got
“A rich, sociologically valuable work that’s more gripping, and more devastating, than fiction.” (Booklist)
“Vivid, heartbreaking.... Readers will be moved by this harrowing and impassioned call for change.” (Publishers Weekly)
“A closely observed chronicle...Sandler displays her journalistic talent by unerringly presenting this dire situation.... An impressive blend of dispassionate reporting, pungent condemnation of public welfare, and gritty humanity.” (Kirkus Reviews)
©2020 Lauren Sandler (P)2020 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"Too few journalists put the time in to allow the working poor and homeless to be heard, speaking clearly about their pitfalls and occasional triumphs, in their own words. Sandler has achieved this with skill." (Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America)
“A remarkable feat of reporting . . . Sandler’s such a keen observer, her writing so clear-eyed. . . . This Is All I Got is a testament to the bigness of the small story, to the power of intimate narratives to speak to something much larger.”—The New York Times
“Meticulously crafted and brilliantly reported, Lauren Sandler’s This Is All I Got exposes the Kafkaesque cruelties of America’s disintegrating social safety net. It is a gut punch of a narrative, an electrifying summons to policy action, and an instant classic.”—Dan-el Padilla Peralta, associate professor of classics, Princeton, and author of Undocumented: A Dominican Boy’s Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League
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Story
Writer Karla Cornejo Villavicencio was on DACA when she decided to write about being undocumented for the first time using her own name. It was right after the election of 2016, the day she realized the story she'd tried to steer clear of was the only one she wanted to tell. So she wrote her immigration lawyer's phone number on her hand in Sharpie and embarked on a trip across the country to tell the stories of her fellow undocumented immigrants—and to find the hidden key to her own.
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Raw, heartbreaking - we can do better by others
- By RapaciousReader on 04-11-20
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The Natural Mother of the Child
- A Memoir of Nonbinary Parenthood
- By: Krys Malcolm Belc
- Narrated by: Krys Malcolm Belc
- Length: 4 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Krys Malcolm Belc has thought a lot about the interplay between parenthood and gender. As a nonbinary, transmasculine parent, giving birth to his son Samson clarified his gender identity. And yet, when his partner Anna adopted Samson, the legal documents listed Belc as "the natural mother of the child." The Natural Mother of the Child journeys both toward and through common perceptions of what it means to have a body and how that body can influence the perception of a family.
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Excellent
- By Kathryn Bradley on 03-04-23
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Lone Stars
- By: Justin Deabler
- Narrated by: Michael Crouch
- Length: 10 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Lone Stars follows the arc of four generations of a Texan family in a changing America. Julian Warner, a father at last, wrestles with a question his husband posed: what will you tell our son about the people you came from, now that they're gone? Finding the answers takes Julian back in time to Eisenhower's immigration border raids, an epistolary love affair during the Vietnam War, crumbling marriages, queer migrations to Cambridge and New York, up to the disorienting polarization of Obama's second term.
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Read for bookclub but fell in Love
- By Ericka Lawson on 09-11-22
By: Justin Deabler
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Born Bright
- A Young Girl's Journey from Nothing to Something in America
- By: C. Nicole Mason
- Narrated by: Robin Eller
- Length: 8 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Born Bright, C. Nicole Mason's powerful memoir, is a story of reconciliation, constrained choices, and life on the other side of the tracks. Born in the 1970s in Los Angeles, California, Mason was raised by a beautiful but volatile 16-year-old single mother. Early on, she learned to navigate between an unpredictable home life and school, where she excelled. By high school, Mason was seamlessly straddling two worlds.
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Solid Book
- By Daryl on 11-06-16
By: C. Nicole Mason
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The Surrogate
- A Novel
- By: Toni Halleen
- Narrated by: Stacey Glemboski, Laurie Catherine Winkel, Andrew Eiden, and others
- Length: 9 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Ruth is a no-nonsense 40-something journalist from the Midwest desperate for a child with her new husband, Hal. Their hope rests with Cally, a 19-year-old who wants to go to college - but doesn’t have the cash. The arrangement seems perfect for everyone. But within a day of the baby’s birth, Cally has a change of heart - and engineers a harrowing escape from the hospital with the newborn. When Ruth and Hal discover that Cally and their daughter are gone, a whole series of doubts and secrets is revealed, and the difference between right and wrong is no longer clear.
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Spectacular - Couldn’t put this book down!
- By Cindi on 01-10-22
By: Toni Halleen
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Fairyland
- A Memoir of My Father
- By: Alysia Abbott
- Narrated by: Alysia Abbott
- Length: 10 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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A beautiful, vibrant memoir about growing up motherless in 1970s and 80s San Francisco with an openly gay father. After his wife dies in a car accident, bisexual writer and activist Steve Abbott moves with his two-year-old daughter to San Francisco. There they discover a city in the midst of revolution, bustling with gay men in search of liberation - few of whom are raising a child. Steve throws himself into San Francisco's vibrant cultural scene.
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Great representation of the time
- By AvidReader22 on 06-07-19
By: Alysia Abbott
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The Yellow House
- By: Sarah M. Broom
- Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
- Length: 14 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1961, Sarah M. Broom’s mother Ivory Mae bought a shotgun house in the then-promising neighborhood of New Orleans East and built her world inside of it. It was the height of the Space Race and the neighborhood was home to a major NASA plant - the postwar optimism seemed assured. A book of great ambition, Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House tells a hundred years of her family and their relationship to home in a neglected area of one of America’s most mythologized cities.
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Great book. I wish the pictures had been included.
- By Lindsay on 02-28-20
By: Sarah M. Broom
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A Wild and Precious Life
- A Memoir
- By: Edie Windsor, Joshua Lyon
- Narrated by: Donna Postel, Joshua Lyon
- Length: 10 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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In this memoir, which she began before passing away in 2017 and completed by her co-writer, Edie recounts her childhood in Philadelphia, her realization that she was a lesbian, and her active social life in Greenwich Village's electrifying underground gay scene during the 1950s. Edie was also one of a select group of trailblazing women in computing, working her way up the ladder at IBM and achieving their highest technical ranking while developing software.
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🏳️🌈 Wow! 🏳️🌈
- By Natalia Zimnoch on 10-15-19
By: Edie Windsor, and others
What listeners say about This Is All I Got
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- D. Ward
- 07-08-20
vote!
heartbreaking and eye opening! Got to fix the system and stop this tragic waste of human potential
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- laura wojtowicz
- 01-26-23
Intriguing story
Going through a year with this author was very interesting and very frustrating. Most of us know little about the system, especially in NYC or what single moms who are trying to better themselves go through.
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- Palmer
- 05-26-20
Great
This story is one of the millions of stories that everyday people need to hear. I hope the readers really understand the heartbreak of navigating the welfare system while dealing with everyday pressure and heartache. This is why people protest the current welfare system because reality is worse than fiction.
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- avidreader
- 05-22-20
Illuminating a big problem with personal story
This book is so gripping, minutely documented, and a great example of how a personal story can illuminate a problem better than any statistic, no matter how shocking. Lauren Sandler tells the main character's story with integrity, compassion, love, and truth. Thank you for your work, Lauren, to tell Camilla's story and show just how broken our social systems are and why they must change.
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- Kindle Customer
- 08-28-20
look at, to look after
Lauren Sandler is a remarkable writer and her courage in confronting the harsh reality of poverty-even harsher through the lens of of a single mother-is a great service to anyone thinking deeply about issues of poverty, child care, education, housing justice, family support, and community building. I hope everyone reading/listening to this book comes out of it asking some version of the question: What is mine to do?
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- Roben Torosyan
- 12-18-20
Not follow the money; follow the people
This is an unbelievable story. No one should have to go through what Camilla goes through. I found myself taking up with every episode and found the entire journey really compelling
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- Home away from home
- 05-23-20
The Story We Need To Hear
This book is simply of dire importance and a brilliant feat. We need to all read this, especially now. Hats off.
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- Erika
- 08-10-20
Truly a wonderful book
Should be required reading for all those who say, "They just need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps." Extremely well-written and articulated. Thank you, Lauren, for all your fine reporting and for directly stating what needs to be understood about poverty and homelessness in the US. I hope someday you can update us on Camila's progress.
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- rosalie b. powers
- 08-18-20
Who cares? No one evidently.
Heartbreaking in its specificity and cruel delineation of a bureaucratic nightmare that crushes the poor while pandering to the greedy excesses of the .01% that feeds on the labor of those beneath them. A tale of uncaring societal rot that predicts the demise of our founders American dream of liberty, justice and the pursuit of happiness for all. A sad, sad tale told well.
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- craig
- 08-11-20
sad but true and complex
A great job showing the sadness and complexity of our welfare system in the age of inequality
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