Jennifer and David McGaha did not pay their Federal and North Carolina income taxes for four years. David did not tell Jennifer about this for all of those four years. He was a professional accountant and part-time real estate agent, and she an adjunct teacher mostly working part-time at private schools despite her Masters degree. They had three kids - Alex, their daughter, and Aaron, their oldest son, were in college, and Eli, their youngest son was a senior in high school, when their home of e

Jennifer and David McGaha did not pay their Federal and North Carolina income taxes for four years. David did not tell Jennifer about this for all of those four years. He was a professional accountant and part-time real estate agent, and she an adjunct teacher mostly working part-time at private schools despite her Masters degree. They had three kids - Alex, their daughter, and Aaron, their oldest son, were in college, and Eli, their youngest son was a senior in high school, when their home of eight years was foreclosed on.‘Flat Broke with Two Goats’ describes the years of the McGahas’ life before, during and after the foreclosure. To me, they were living a life of privilege before the financial crash of 2008, and why not? David was earning a six-figure income. Both were college educated, and she was an attentive mom raising three kids on a wonderful elitist country farm with a slightly rundown house they were fixing up. The kids were in good private schools for most of their lives since the McGahas could afford it, right?Then one night David broke the news. Two IRS agents came to David’s office. They owed more than one hundred thousand dollars to the Feds, and eight thousand to the State of North Carolina. In the months that followed, their van was repossessed, the phone was disconnected and the power was turned off. Wages were garnished. She did not have a teaching license or an education degree. She could not do a secretary or receptionist or a store clerk job because of how she dressed and the jobs required an organized and detail-oriented skill set. They worry night and day about money, something I know about, too, gentle reader, if not the other things she describes.So, what do they do? David takes over a restaurant for an accounting client, hoping to make it profitable despite having little cooking expertise. He continued to work as an accountant, but many of his clients, mostly real estate and construction clients, had stopped coming. She continued her work as an adjunct teacher, while attending her book club. They kept their six animals - five dogs and a cat. They tried to live normally as elite eastern seaboard Americans do for many more months, until they couldn't.Then David found a house. A hundred years old, it is an extremely weathered beaten-down house owned by a family of one of David’s cousins. It is on fifty-three wooded acres in North Carolina. It is heated by a wood boiler, and water is piped in directly from a nearby creek. She waffles a bit - who wouldn’t? We are talking about dark and lonely rural country, readers - snakes, mice, opossums, 🕷 bugs, all over the kitchen and the carpet - all coming into the house at night, no hot water, and long dirt roads, and distant and strange neighbors who answer their doors with shotguns. It is as primitive as rural people can live, not counting shacks or tents. She finally agrees.As the months go by, they acquire chickens, then goats, although they knew nothing about raising them. They learn, and so do we. Funny little anecdotes are told in this memoir.The couple are all good for now, more or less, four years after moving to their still dilapidated home. But it feels like Jennifer McGaha is a little, well, unhappy, to me, as a rural goat and chicken owner. She signs up for an MFA degree, and then writes this supposedly wryly amusing book about their adventures and life choices, with recipes between chapters. She looks relaxed tending her animals in her photos, but I can't help but feel she is a fish out of water in that house.I did not like the choices author Jennifer McGaha makes according to her memoir. I cannot imagine making the choices she made for myself, nor do I understand her reasoning that she was partially at fault for their tax situation under any circumstances. True, no one is perfect, sh*t happens, when life hands you lemons it is best to smile and make lemonade after grieving your losses. But the result of the monumental betrayal, and to me it was a betrayal, of her husband destroyed their lives. She sees it as an honest mistake anyone could make, as do many other reviewers. Not me. To me, he betrayed their partnership, and he lied to her for four years about it. His ‘mistake’ robbed her of some possible choices she would have preferred making I think, closing many doors she had had hopes of opening, I suspect.To me, what he did was the same as if he decided to drive home while dead drunk from a party and then had a deadly accident. Yet she ends up feeling as if she had some responsibility in his decision to not pay income taxes for four years, and not telling her for four years. On top of that, well, she ultimately decides to stay in the marriage and live like a pioneer, and like Ruth from the Bible: “Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the Lord do so to me, and more also, if aught but death part thee and me.” Or something like that, although she does not speak of religion at all, gentle reader. She could have gone to her grandmother’s house. Or her rich parents’ house, which was upscale and three stories high. Or to her brother’s house in Florida.So I have a dilemma. How does one write a fair review of an autobiography written by a brave living author when in reading it all I kept thinking was things like:She describes a bad first marriage she had before she married David. She was an abused wife, but eventually she left, barely escaping with her life. However, she does seem to be trying to say she made mistakes, too, so both David and Jennifer are not perfect people. Life happened, she is saying. The scales with which she is measuring their errors are not the same, imho.Many reviewers dislike Jennifer as a person. Many have expressed their impression of her as being a whiner. They think she blames other people for her problems.O _ oNo. Not. I see a person raised as an upper-class child of privilege struggling to make sense of the train wreck she suddenly found herself in as an middle-aged adult. I think she was frozen, which she admits (we all do flight or fight or freeze when in trouble) and unable to move past her class expectations. I think this book is an effort to make some money and maybe try to make sense of what happened to herself. She knows everyone expects her to smile and pull up her bootstraps, including her. Maybe she is, but I got a sense she is still trying to understand why the Universe let this happen when it clearly was not something which occurs to people of her class. To me, it is all about the bad husbands with serious character flaws. I do not think her anecdotes of her life funny or charming. They make me shudder.Others do not like the style of writing in the book, or the architecture. It looks to me like she is following MFA-recommended Good Practices in writing a memoir. I have read many such following this pattern. But maybe the story of her disaster, for some of us readers, rings too loud, drowning out the supposed charms of learning to exist in a new rural life of deprivation and "the rewards of simplicity" after having been evicted from the upper middle-class.Anyway. I do not know exactly how to rate this. Bravery: five stars. Writing: three stars.Oh well.