Passing for Middle-Classish

One woman's confession sparks a reckoning about money, shame and identity

Jeni Gunn would fit right in at my condo. She’s got The Look, as they say in Fashionland. Sundress you might see on a mannequin tomorrow, funky shoes meant for striding. Wit that cuts through clichés like Thomas Keller’s knife through an organic onion. If I knocked on her door to borrow a dollop of Dijon, we’d soon be talking up a storm.

Gunn can’t afford to live in a building like mine, with its concierge and party room. Home is a basement apartment in Victoria, B.C. As for the Dijon, even condiments are out of reach for her—along with haircuts, dental care, vitamins and any clothes she can’t buy secondhand. When I was her age, 51, Freedom 55 beckoned. No such fantasies for Gunn, a gig worker ricocheting between emergency management, private investigation and what passes for freelance writing these days. Need a 10-dollar blog post on automotive window tinting? Count her in (but don’t try to pay her in weed). If nobody stiffs her, she makes about $2,800 a month.

Just when it seemed she couldn’t get a break, Gunn pitched Maclean’s, the most venerable of Canada’s remaining magazines, on a first-person story about the truth behind her “middle-classish” persona. “Secretly Poor” made the cover this month, and now I can’t get Jeni Gunn off my mind.

Even more than her endless “cut[ting] off, cut[ting] out and cut[ting] down,” what haunts me is her isolation. Gunn has no money for getaways with friends who can afford “a fake river on their lawn” or a marble foyer the size of her entire apartment. She might have to bow out of the next potluck party, pleading a family emergency. “The emergency is that, this month, my gigs aren’t pulling in enough money, and… the cheese platter will cause an irreversible financial downward spiral.”

Last week at the farmers’ market, I admired a golden loaf of sourdough potato bread. How much? The vendor had to repeat the price. Holy moly, I heard right the first time. Sixteen bucks.

“It’s an extra-large loaf.” The vendor mistook me for a prospect. Among neighbors with multiple homes, each sporting the latest in Japanese toilets and Italian kitchen cabinetry, I can pass for affluentish. Chalk it up to a way with hats and jewelry; I’ve been shopping in the closet lately. Truth is, I’d like to stay in the one home I’ve got and replace some beloved upholstery that just took a beating from our dog. Every dental checkup brings expensive news as childhood fillings crumble like Victorian chimneys.

And yet, for about 30 seconds, I imagined breakfasting on artisan potato bread with peanut butter and clementine jam.

That bread would be a trifle compared to the splurges of my free-spending corporate days. Silver evening skirt I gave away with the price tag still attached. Golf club I joined on a whim, before remembering my fraught relationship with balls of any kind. Whirlpool tub I ordered for a posh former condo, despite the builder’s preposterous markup. It seemed I deserved a long soak in that tub after back-to-back meetings broken only by cold pizza at my desk. Frugality 55 never crossed my mind.

I edited a leading women’s magazine; my husband hired and fired people like me. Canadian magazines did not make us—or anyone—rich, but we could buy what we wanted and did not aspire to a Porsche or his-and-hers Rolexes. We had the good fortune to build our careers back when motivated people could thrive in jobs with benefits, pensions and a year-end bonus. More than 20 years along in retirement, I’ve cut way back. Spa vacations, disposable contact lenses, pretty much any book I can borrow from the library. Why pay for shrinking portions in a restaurant? At home we can hear each other and eat just as well.

When asparagus was in season, it inspired me night after night—roasted with a garnish of panko and Parmesan, steamed and drizzled with olive tapenade, sautéed with butter and grated lemon peel. I heaped our plates with asparagus till my husband could barely stand the sight of one more spear.

Too bad Jeni Gunn couldn’t come to dinner. She envies friends who can afford asparagus. As for bread, any bread, she’s cut it from her budget.

Jeni Gunn keeps bursting from my mind into my conversation. She has the kind of voice every editor hopes to discover. In 20 years of editing, I didn’t find many. But what really gets under my skin is her fearless, exhilarating honesty. It’s not okay to admit you’re passing for better off than you are—until one brave soul goes first. The other day I told my husband, “This woman has the makings of a book.”

I might as well have told him peanut butter was on sale at No Frills. “We’ve seen how much money there is in books.”

An indie press published my last book for a modest advance. After marketing costs and my agent’s cut, I might have broken even. Still, I count myself lucky. I didn’t write Starter Dog to crack the New York Times bestseller list or get a call from Spielberg’s people. I wrote for the pleasure of awakening a story, word by word, and setting it free to touch others who would find in my experience a glimmer of their own. I had the means to take my sweet time, free of pressure to bring in some bucks any way I could.

My former industry had withered, but the local school needed a crossing guard. At up to $100 a day, the job whipped writing’s ass. Just for fun, I imagined the interview: “So, Rona, I see you edited a magazine. Haven’t picked up one of those for a while.”

Once upon a time, a cover story in Maclean’s might have attracted an agent or two. Agents want bestsellers now, and so far they’re passing Gunn by. When I connected with her on Facebook, she’d heard from a couple of podcasters. Meanwhile, she’s at work on her book. She told Substacker and author Tara Henley, in an interview posted last week, “[A]t 51, I finally feel like I can call myself a writer.”

There’s a struggling multitude like Jeni Gunn, but right now she’s the one who sings in my head. The world was not asking for the story that kept calling, “Write me!” No one else was telling it. Why not her? Unlike me, she had to write with a headful of bills and gigs. But she loved the story too much to quit.

Now I’m loving it back from the other side of the country. Hoping against hope for the condo neighbor I won’t have, the almost-friend I may never meet, whose words invited me into her world and nudged me to look at my own from a different angle.

I hear you, Jeni. Tell me more. If you come to Substack, I’m in for a paid subscription.

Do you know how it feels to pass for better than you are? Have you watched a loved one try to pull it off? Tell me about it.

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All my essays are free to read, so browse and share to your heart’s content. If you enjoyed this one, I think you’ll like “Nobody Owes Me Anything.” A deep bow to those of you who choose to pay for no reason but the pleasure of cheering me on.