When I first reported on the nomads in a 2014 Harper’s Magazine story, I spent two weeks living out of a tent in the Sonoran Desert. He didn’t get a deep story from them.īasically, I wanted to watch people rather than direct one on one interviews, so, for me, it was that. And everybody said what he thought they wanted to hear. I have a journalist friend, Ted Conover, who once talked about interviewing a group of people but he walked in and felt like a tourist in a Hawaiian shirt. Jessica Bruder: Yeah, and also just to be there, be accurate and go deep with the story. Did you decide to do that because you wanted to get to know the Nomad folks better? Q: You actually went on the road to investigate that, renting an RV van, drove 15,000 miles, and took three years to research. I’m really interested in subcultures and how labor interfaces with the digital age, so I just started looking, and found out there was a program called Camper Force but not only that - the bigger point is that there were hundreds or maybe even thousands of jobs like this all over the country with people selling Christmas trees or pumpkins or fireworks. Basically, she lived in an RV and couldn’t afford to retire and that there was a whole program for people like her. Jessica Bruder: I did not know this subject existed until I read a magazine article where somebody told a journalist that she was working in a program at Amazon. Q: As both a journalist who also teaches at the Colombia University, what was the tipping point for you to write the book “Nomadland”? Did it start as an article or TV show? In the wake of Zhao’s film which is getting awards and Oscar nominations, Bruder and I conducted the following one on one interview and considers both the film and the book’s impact. In Her third film, Nomadland, she plants a couple of famous actors among some real people that lived the lives described in Bruder’s book.

They hit the road following seasonal gigs across the country and became an inexpensive, flexible and disposable workforce for employers.įilmmaker Chloe Zhao, known for casting non-actors to interpret the essence of their lives, places her films in their real world. In 2017’s Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, author Jessica Bruder wrote about van-dwelling Americans, mostly older people who, in the wake of the Great Recession, were losing steady jobs, had paltry Social Security payments, and, with ballooning housing costs, found themselves unable to get by.

Jessica bruder author