Shortly after moving into a house with her husband and son in 2014, Eula Biss began keeping a special diary. Owning this brick Chicago bungalow gave her “a new sense of security, a feeling of solidity,” she writes in her new book, “Having and Being Had,” and she felt moved to chronicle her novel feelings of comfort, as well as her discomfort with that comfort. She knew it wouldn’t be long before what seemed extraordinary about her life became ordinary, and she felt she should record her uneasy observations about work and class, race and privilege, poverty and pleasure—probe them like a tongue on a canker sore—as a way...

Source: Wall Street Journal September 10, 2020 23:03 UTC