A Conversation with Stephanie Land
If you see Stephanie Land in public and you are a stranger, you don’t have to approach her.
That was one of the takeaways from the conversation we had about living in Missoula as a famous person. Land’s meteoric success with her first novel Maid foisted her (somewhat reluctantly) into the national spotlight. Her debut memoir landed on Obama’s summer book list in 2019 and inspired a popular Netflix series of the same name.
Now, with her new novel Class hitting bookstores, Land spoke with me about what it means to write about Missoula, her sex life, and two of her favorite subjects: her daughters.
Land isn’t the only famous person living in Missoula. Anyone who has found themselves sitting near Academy Award winner J.K. Simmons at a Griz game or bumped into Pearl Jam drummer Jeff Ament at a coffee shop knows that celebrity sightings aren’t rare in the Garden City. Last year Hank Green joked that if you see him in public, you should treat him like you do wildlife and back away slowly.
It isn’t a lack of friendliness. It’s that everyone deserves some level of normality in the place they call home.
“How do you handle it?”
“Beta blockers,” Land jokes. “It’s something I’ve tried to accept. Missoula used to be a place where I could be a normal person out in public. That changed a lot when the series was announced. People started approaching me a lot. I became almost agoraphobic.”
Land’s newfound success presented a dilemma: How do you get away from your job when your job is to share your life with unflinching honesty? Land describes just once in the past decade that she let go of the relentless pressure to grind and the accompanying stress it produces.
“We went on vacation to Hawaii. It was the chance to get away from everything familiar and just sit on a beach and watch the kids play. I wish it didn’t take flying for seven hours to feel that way.”
Back at home, Land says the stress never stops unless she is intentional about quieting it. It’s one of the things she works on in therapy. The other thing? Relationships.
She describes a time after her second daughter was born that she had a scary experience with a volatile man in Crazy Mike’s Video. For those of you new here, Crazy Mike’s was a Missoula staple before streaming services put video stores under (RIP). That scary incident made Land realize she was all her daughters had. If something happened to her, what would happen to them?
“I reached out to some people to ask them to be their godparent. No one agreed to.”
Land says she spiraled into a deep postpartum depression and had convinced herself, “I made my bed and now I have to lie in it. I felt like I needed to hide and do things on my own.”
She lives with the lasting effects of those early years — when poverty, parenting pressure, and judgment made her feel less than human. In Class, she describes an Earn-to-Learn program through a crisis pregnancy center where pregnant women take parenting classes in order to earn points to spend on necessities for their infants. Working a physically demanding job all day, parenting, and taking classes at UofM didn't leave any room for parenting classes.
“Society projects stupidity onto poor people. I remember when I cut my hair short and people reminded me that I wouldn’t have to use as much shampoo.”
Still, she thinks of Missoula with tenderness, remembering the days she researched this mountain town and dreamed of moving here. Land says she practically memorized Missoula’s wikipedia page. She knew all about the farmer’s markets and festivals and family activities. The ungentrified Missoula of the early 2010s was free-spirited, artistic, and bohemian.
During that time, Land clung to small pleasures, and locals will appreciate that Class is chock full of descriptions of familiar places like Als and Vics, the Rhino, Top Hat, and an ice cream shop that is obviously Sweet Peaks.
She also writes prolifically about her sex life in Class, declaring the summer of 2013 was “hot mom summer.” If the former president reads this book, she hopes he gets a redacted copy, she jokes. Her sex scenes are — ahem — fire emoji.
As for Missoula’s charitable organizations, of which Land has become an unintentional expert, she offers this observation: It’s a rare thing for a person experiencing housing or food insecurity to be able to just state a need and be given it without hoops to jump through or strings attached. When a person is using all their energy just trying to survive, don’t give them something else they have to do.
Or as Land puts it: “Poor people don’t need parenting classes. They need diapers.”
We encourage you to order Class through local booksellers like Fact and Fiction. Join Stephanie Land and Hank Green at the Missoula Public Library on Sunday, Nov. 19 to hear Stephanie talk about Class. Find more information here.
