As a single parent caught in the welfare trap, Stephanie Land got the only job she could, tidying homes for the comfortably well-off. Now she has turned her experiences into an acclaimed new book

At first glance, it’s not immediately obvious that the toddler in the video I am watching is taking her first wobbly steps in a homeless shelter. Watching the tiny girl babble to her mother behind the camera, I am distracted by how spotless the floor looks. Yet in the eyes of Stephanie Land, the person who cleaned it, it was appalling: “Years of dirt were etched into the floor. No matter how hard I scrubbed, I could never get it clean.”

People such as Land are perhaps the biggest threat to the myth of the American Dream: someone who worked hard, yet found her very country pitted against her success. Her new book, Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive, is both a memoir of her time working as a cleaner in middle-class households, and a dismantling of the lies the US tells itself about the poor: namely, that they don’t work. As Land puts it, she was “overwhelmed by how much work it took to prove I was poor”.

“The country lives by the myth that if you work hard enough, you’ll make it,” she says. “For me, I felt like if I wasn’t making it, I wasn’t working hard enough.”

Frighteningly, before she arrived at that homeless shelter, Land’s life was unremarkable. In her 20s, she wandered from low-paid to low-paid job: barista, dog daycare, stalls at farmers’ markets. She had none of the usual factors society would pick out to explain her poverty: no alcohol problems, no history of drug use, a regular, if fractured, family life. At 28, she became pregnant. But the father, she writes, flew into rages, threatened and insulted her. With no family to rely on, Land entered the welfare system, moving to the shelter – where her daughter took her first steps – to transitional housing, to a trailer parked in a driveway, always desperately clinging to stability.

Subsidising her meagre income with welfare meant submitting her life to relentless scrutiny: curfews and urine tests at the shelter; welfare officers wanting proof that her car wasn’t too nice; supermarket cashiers silently judging her groceries when she used food stamps. She endured each indignity to look after her daughter, Mia.

Searching for work in an economy that was still raw from the global financial crisis, Land began working as a cleaner for a private firm; $6 (£4.65) an hour for tidying up houses she could only dream of affording.

If you are willing to get on your knees to scrub a toilet, you will find work. No one is as desperate as a single parent

Strikingly, all her fellow cleaners were women and a huge proportion were single mums. Now 39, Land’s explanation for this is simple: “It is flexible, most of the cleaning happens during school hours, you can bring your kid, and it is a job no one wants to do. As long as you are willing to get on your knees to scrub a toilet, you will always be able to find work. And no one is as desperate as a single parent.” Eighty percent of the US’s 12m single-parent households are headed by mothers – and 40% live below the poverty line.

On such low income, money became a relentless weight: every car journey had to be weighed up against the cost of petrol. Providing food for Mia often meant going without herself, bolstering her stomach with instant coffee and, on the good days, a peanut butter sandwich. She would shop for groceries at night, to avoid the gaze of fellow shoppers; one man, after seeing the food stamps in her hand, shouted: “You’re welcome,” as if he was personally paying for her to eat. In one of their homes, a tiny humid studio in Skagit valley, Washington, a relentless black mould continually resurfaced, making Mia constantly ill; kind hospital nurses tending to Mia gave her a dehumidifier.

It is remarkable what a cleaner can learn about your life from the receipts on your fridge, the number of family photos on your walls, the papers on your desk. Going through middle America’s dirty laundry gave Land the time and the perspective to mull over the myth that work always means success. She scrubbed vomit, mould and blood from the homes of people who, despite their 2.5 bathrooms and nice cars, seemed just as unhappy as her. In one house she dubbed the Porn House, she tries to figure out the lives of its owners: the husband with his Hustler magazines and lube always out on display in his bedroom, the wife’s extensive collection of romance novels in hers. Popping ibuprofen to cope with the constant strain that cleaning took on her body, Land gazed longingly at the large opioid stash in the Chef’s House. Wiping down the already spotless surfaces of the Cigarette Lady’s House, she finds connection with the mysterious owner by discovering her secret: a freezer packed with Virginia Slims.

After Donald Trump’s election victory in 2016, much was made of the power of the disgruntled working poor. Yet Land encountered the most aggression from those on the other side of the “welfare cliff”: those not quite poor enough to receive benefits. She straddled the line a few times: a few dollars more a month meant she could suddenly lose hundreds in benefits: “I was penalised for working more, for working harder. Why, as an example, do some states require you to have less than $1,000 [£775] in savings? They are actively discouraging people from saving. Some people work really hard and still have no food in the fridge, while the wealthy are just getting wealthier while promoting this rhetoric that poor people are the ones taking all the money. And we still think they’re the ones making the best decisions. Hell, I thought that when I went into their houses.”

Later on, when Land “came out” as poor, some of her own friends told her that they were on food stamps or using Medicaid. “I had no idea how many friends were struggling. We need to have an honest conversation about the face of welfare. I think that poor people are scary for a lot of people, because they represent what could happen to them.”

I was called a cockroach, vermin … People didn’t like knowing that their cleaners had opinions about them

In her journalism – spoiler: Maid does have a somewhat happy ending – this anxiety is best reflected in sanctimonious comments left by readers. Strangers demand to know why she has tattoos, a smartphone, why she didn’t get an abortion. “I think they’re trying to reassure themselves that it couldn’t happen to them, that this was all the result of my bad decisions.”

Her first paid piece of writing, an essay for Vox about her time working as a cleaner, went viral in the worst way. “My sleepy little website, that usually was only seen by my mum, was getting 5,000 hits an hour. People were calling me a cockroach, vermin, telling me I should be in jail. People with cleaners didn’t like knowing that their cleaners had opinions about them. It was hard for me to even go outside for a couple of weeks.”

While Land’s book is set during Barack Obama’s presidency, she is watching Trump’s welfare and tax policies with trepidation. “They are making it harder to be on welfare – raising the age to qualify or allowing states to require more paperwork. They are clinging to this idea that poor people don’t work.” She cried when Trump was elected: “It felt scary. Suddenly, everyone felt emboldened to do whatever they wanted. Trump’s election gave trolls a platform to treat people horribly. That is a scary feeling for a mum of two daughters.”

The book ends on a high: with Land moving to Missoula, Montana, a place she had always dreamed of living. She enrolled in university, then navigated support programmes for underprivileged writers, which helped place her pieces in papers such as the Washington Post and the New York Times, as well as providing a stipend.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Land with her daughter Mia in 2010. Photograph: Courtesy of Stephanie Land

Off paper, however, things didn’t get easier. A month after graduating, she gave birth to a second daughter, Coraline, named after one of Neil Gaiman’s heroines. (Gaiman has been a surprise source of support: “I once sent him a photo of Coraline and we’ve sort of become friends. Every time I get something published, he tweets something like, ‘I am really proud of her’, which is nice.”) She found a new balance with Jamie, Mia’s father, but then married a man who later physically abused her.

While Land is no longer on welfare (although she still lives in low-income housing), money has not healed all wounds. The price of poverty – exhaustively self-evaluating herself, in welfare meetings, in supermarket queues, in the aftermath of unexpected costs – was panic attacks, a distrust of happiness and signs of post-traumatic stress disorder. “Right now, my anxiety levels are really high because things are going really well and I am just waiting for the catch.” She looks startled when I ask if she would ever take a holiday. “A vacation is airfares, hotel, food, childcare. Is it really worth it to be on a beach for a week? Exercise, hiking, showers – I don’t have time for that! I have piles of laundry, I have to pick up the kids, I have an overwhelming amount of work to do.”

After seeing inside the homes of the better off, Land does not want to be rich. “I’d like to not be in debt, I’d like to own my home, but I still imagine myself living a very simple life. It would be nice to have enough money to put my kids through college, to not worry about money. But that’s about it.”

She has considered one indulgence: a cleaner. “It’s been so busy, I’ve been thinking it would be nice for a couple of months. But I could never bring myself to do it. There is no way I could afford it, because I would just want to throw money at them – I’d leave $20 bills in every room.” She laughs, but it is sad. She found it such a demeaning and demoralising job, she says, quietly. “I couldn’t do it to someone else.”

• Maid, by Stephanie Land, is published by Orion (£14.99 rrp). To order a copy for £13.99, with free UK p&p, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846