Humans of New York creator Brandon Stanton teams up with intensely human, long time New York resident Stephanie Johnson to tell a story that doesn’t fit on a single picture’s description on Instagram.
Stephanie is something of a tragic figure, although I think she would cringe and resent such a description. But as she told the story of her life (she narrates the audiobook), it was hard for me not to see the bright young girl who had to fight against racism and sexism at every turn in her life in addition to being raised by a mother who was clearly deeply traumatized by her own experiences with these oppressive systems and did not cope with it well enough to be the sort of parenting influence Stephanie needed. Indeed, at one point in her life, Stephanie is faced with the choice of spending up to two years in prison and surrendering her newborn or live with her mother again, and our girl chose jail.
Stephanie’s journey is one of constant change, of adapting to new and often unpleasant circumstances. In many ways, her experience will feel very familiar to that of many young people (<40). The pressure to scrap together money for basic necessities by finding any job that will take you and coming up with a side hustle to both feed your creative side and also supplement the precarious income of your day job. The loneliness of moving away from a family that doesn’t accept you only to be replaced with a revolving door of people who have also been hurt too much to form a meaningful, lasting connections.
Through it all, you also get Stephanie’s acerbic humour and sharp intellect, two traits that clearly carried through life.
It’s the kind of life story that doesn’t get much air time and it was a pleasure to read.
One note is that people describe it as very shocking. I don’t know if they have very delicate sensibilities or it’s meant to be hype for the book, but I found little shocking in here. Sure there’s the odd stripper that wows crowds by dispensing mustard from her vagina for an audience’s hot dogs, so I guess your mileage will dramatically vary on whether you find some of these stories shocking or hilarious or tragic.
If you can get your hands on it, get the audio book. It’s only three hours long and Stephanie is the one to read it.