In 2017’s Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, author Jessica Bruder wrote about van-dwelling Americans, mostly older people who, in the wake of the Great Recession, were losing steady jobs, had paltry Social Security payments, and, with ballooning housing costs, found themselves unable to get by. 

They hit the road following seasonal gigs across the country and became an inexpensive, flexible and disposable workforce for employers.

Filmmaker Chloe Zhao, known for casting non-actors to interpret the essence of their lives, places her films in their real world. In Her third film, Nomadland, she plants a couple of famous actors among some real people that lived the lives described in Bruder’s book.

In the wake of Zhao’s film which is getting awards and Oscar nominations, Bruder and I conducted the following one on one interview and considers both the film and the book’s impact.

Q: As both a journalist who also teaches at the Colombia University, what was the tipping point for you to write the book “Nomadland”? Did it start as an article or TV show?

Jessica Bruder: I did not know this subject existed until I read a magazine article where somebody told a journalist that she was working in a program at Amazon.  Basically, she lived in an RV and couldn’t afford to retire and that there was a whole program for people like her. I’d never heard of such a thing before. I’m really interested in subcultures and how labor interfaces with the digital age, so I just started looking, and found out there was a program called Camper Force but not only that — the bigger point is that there were hundreds or maybe even thousands of jobs like this all over the country with people selling Christmas trees or pumpkins or fireworks. My head exploded.

Q: You actually went on the road to investigate that, renting an RV van, drove 15,000 miles, and took three years to research. Did you decide to do that because you wanted to get to know the Nomad folks better?

Jessica Bruder: Yeah, and also just to be there, be accurate and go deep with the story. I have a journalist friend, Ted Conover, who once talked about interviewing a group of people but he walked in and felt like a tourist in a Hawaiian shirt. And everybody said what he thought they wanted to hear. He didn’t get a deep story from them.

Basically, I wanted to watch people rather than direct one on one interviews, so, for me, it was that. When I first reported on the nomads in a 2014 Harper’s Magazine story, I spent two weeks living out of a tent in the Sonoran Desert. For the book, I wanted to go much deeper – and that meant I had to travel with these people, camp where they camped, and spend time with them outside of formal interviews — to really feel the story from the inside. That meant I had to get a van.

Q: You actually worked at Amazon for a week, what did you take away from that experience, and what kind of things caught your attention while you’re worked there?

Jessica Bruder: Before I went to the warehouse, I had interviewed at least 50 people working for Camper Force. At that point, I realized interviewing new people wouldn’t teach me more — to learn more, I had to go so even if you telling other people’s stories, trying to walk where they walked and see what they see just makes it a richer experience.

But when I worked in the CamperForce program, I was one of the only three members of my group who didn’t have gray hair. It amazed me to see that older people are doing this kind of physically challenging job, with lots of squatting and reaching for items on shelves. That kind of work isn’t easy on the joints.

Q: When you hit the road, you met people who are leading a nomad lifestyle; what was it like meeting Linda May and what is your impression of her?

Jessica Bruder: When I met Linda May she had been on the road for under a year, so she was new and still learning. So to have the opportunity to follow her and use her as a proxy for the reader because she’s getting educated and the reader gets to sit on her shoulder for that whole experience. Linda also had a really interesting goal. She wanted to build a sustainable homestead called an “Earthship,” and I was fascinated by that.

I love the way she speaks, she just has such a wonderful way of talking, her cadences are fantastic. She didn’t act differently from who she was when I was interviewing her. Sometimes, when you’re a journalist, you interview somebody and they look like one thing and then they talk to a cashier, a friend, or somebody on the street,  and they seem like a completely different person.  They’re showing you what they think you want to see.

Q: The Amazon warehouse is the size of two or three football stadiums. For an elderly worker to go around and scan some products could be very tough work. Can you talk about the physical challenges those workers faced?

Jessica Bruder: In the older warehouses –- the ones that didn’t have robots bringing shelves to the workers — I heard about people walking as far as 15 miles on concrete in a single shift, which is very hard on aging bodies. There were dispensers with free over-the-counter painkillers. Workers also had serious repetitive-stress injuries in their wrists from using a handheld scanner over and over again. It’s absolutely challenging work.

Q: Did you get a chance to see the set, talk to Frances McDormand or Chloe Zhao, to give your insights?

Jessica Bruder: I did get to visit the set when the film team was shooting in Quartzsite, Arizona.

They were re-creating an event, the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous that I reported on back in 2014, and I lived out of my bed on the set for about a week.

It was incredible. It was amazing to see Frances interact with so many people I’d been following for so long in the book. And to see how gracious and actual she was, people really didn’t seem weirded out at all. When she first came in, I think everybody was wondering,  are people going to be, “Oh my gosh, it’s Frances McDormand,” but it felt real in a way that I think comes through in the film as well.

Q: Some of new nomad folks rejected the notion of homeless. They treated themselves to dinner at restaurants, and their appearance is that of the middle class. What kind of lifestyle stood out for you?

Jessica Bruder: It was fascinating because in the US for a long time we’ve had flat wages and rising costs of shelter. It makes it really hard for people to provide for all of the necessities for a comfortable life. Many of the people I met were in a situation where they found a way to hack the system. Basically, they cut out rent, mortgages, utilities and all that and got out on the road. It’s funny, in the US we’re always talking about innovation that we are innovative but that’s destructive and often it doesn’t amount to very much. To imagine yourself later in your life completely upending how you do everything. Seeing their courage and their creativity and  their resilience really was awesome to me.

Q: People living in those vehicles makes them vulnerable, especially if you’re black as well. If you’re living in the car on the street, police would come and search them. What kind of things did you heard of from these nomad folks — did they have any crazy encounters?

Jessica Bruder: People asked me about nomads in terms of crime. Frankly, I didn’t hear about stuff like that. I didn’t hear about people being victimized. When I got home, people said, “Did you feel — as a single woman on the road — weren’t you terrified?” I felt I was very disappointing, so I would tell them there was one danger I had to look out for just to give them something. I told them it was a caloric hazard, by which meant eating too much because people kept feeding me. That was the most dangerous thing for me. Lol.

Q: After this pandemic and having seen this film, do you think more people will take to a nomad lifestyle?

Jessica Bruder: It’s a culture that was already growing and continues to grow, so that wouldn’t surprise me one bit.

Q: Did their families worry about someone who leads a lifestyle like that?

Jessica Bruder: Sometimes, I met people whose families did worry about them being out there on the road. They often tried to explain to them “look, I have a whole community out there,” but it was hard to translate for people who haven’t experienced it before. I knew other people whose families were very supportive and, in some cases, I met people estranged from their families. One gentleman I met–his family was originally from Macedonia, he was Muslim and he went home for Ramadan. His family pretty much threw him out of  the house and said he was a bad example for the children. That was incredibly painful for him.

Q: What do you want the audience to take away from this film?

Jessica Bruder: The last thing I want to do is tell people what to think or experience. The value of something like this is that you can get immersed in it. But I do hope that people come out of this feeling like their world has broadened, if only just a little bit, that it’s gotten a bit wider, and that when they look at people, instead of making certain generalizations about them, they wonder what their story was. For me that would be the most rewarding thing.