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In this memoir, the author begins by reflecting upon his experiences as a young student completing his educational endeavors as an English literature scholar in the Philadelphia area in the late 1970s. He tells of his life as a teaching assistant and his rise in the pharmaceutical industry. He obtains what most would consider the American ideal: marriage, a lucrative job in New York City, a Cape Cod home, and a dog. However, both his climb up the work ladder in New York and his marriage leave him feeling increasingly unfulfilled. After his marriage implodes, he finds himself financially unable to maintain his former lifestyle and falls into great dissatisfaction with his work. He “thought about the millions of other people in Manhattan who were just getting by, living paycheck to paycheck. I thought about the high-living socialites who didn’t give a damn about the rest of us. I started to hate New York.” At this point, he decides to leave the workforce and pursue artistic endeavors. In the process, he discovers that one’s happiness does not entirely depend on one’s income.
Godwin’s book, with its nod to George Orwell’s 1933 book Down and Out in Paris and London, reads as a philosophical travelogue of his experiences in and around Philadelphia and New York City. His honest look at his life as a poor student, his rise in the workforce, and his decision to live on unemployment for six months in New York offers a glimpse into the nuances of social status. “My liberal upbringing had made me sympathetic to the under-privileged, and I wanted to walk in their shoes to feel how it felt to come from the wrong side of the tracks. I was now free to do whatever I wanted, and I wanted this.”
Reflecting on this life and the people he meets at poetry readings around New York, he states, “The cycle of poverty and writing was difficult to figure out. George Orwell didn’t figure it out in his lifetime.” Though he never reaches the depths of despair and depravity of Orwell’s walk on the hard side of life, he nevertheless writes candidly of his painful observations during the period he is unemployed. “My desire to experience the underbelly of modern American life had left me divorced, alone, and unloved. There was no turning back on this path. The only future I had left was to fully explore this empty path and hope that there was a rainbow at the end of it.” Taking this road leads the author to reflect on the poverty and lifestyle he encounters, which he does with heartfelt and insightful poetry. Though he doesn’t live like Orwell as far as sleeping on the street or embankments, he is an excellent chronicler of those who do.
Just as Orwell’s work ends in a philosophical discussion concerning poverty and the plight of those who live life in the shadows, Godwin ends his book with similar reflections. “As I discovered during my six unemployed months in New York, the writer’s life isn’t such a great life when you don’t know where your next meal is coming from.” Through this work, the author is certainly included in that realm of “artists and visionaries who are willing to sacrifice so much to tell us the truth.”