The Dirty Life

The Dirty Life
By Kristin Kimball
276 Pages, Scribner
reviewed by Stephen Page

A successful freelance writer with a degree from Harvard lives on the trendy Upper East Side of New York (OK, so she lives in a walkup across the street form the Hells Angels main headquarters building—but the area is becoming popular for aging preppies, so rent and property prices are rising). She gets a hack job from a magazine editor to drive out to small plot of land just past the Big Apple’s suburbs to interview an educated neo-hippie who is running an organic farm. The man avoids her when he can, gives her errands to do when he can’t, and just generally bosses her around and treats her like trash for three days, until she finally stands her ground and corners him as he is running from one of his thousand daily chores to another of his thousand daily chores, and she demands as she points a finger at him, “Look, are you going to give me the interview or not?” He stops in his tracks, chuckles, looks deeply and respectfully into her eyes, and says “yes.” In the ensuing interview, while they are pulling the entrails out of a freshly slaughtered pig, she falls in love with him and he falls in love with her. For the next several years they build a life together while struggling to keep an organic farm viable.

In the memoir Dirty Life, Kristin Kimball shows the reader that “pastoral” and “bucolic” have different connotations—and that neither word is synonymous with “idyllic.” Yet, for Ms. Kimball and her fiancé, privilege is perspective. “Wealth” and “success” are subjective words which cannot be measured in meaning with a pop-culture ruler, but rather with how one lives life.

Once you get past the first page of romance-novel description, The Dirty Life is an outstandingly written book. If you are like me, when I am reading a book that I love, whether it be for its content, plot, voice, characters, or style (and in this case, all of the preceding), you don’t want to finish the book. When you find yourself arriving toward the end, perhaps the last fifth of the book, you procrastinate, continually finding excuses to not read more than a few pages at a time because you don’t want the beauty of the story or the magic of the story telling to end. This is one of those books.

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Check out the book and the author bio on the website, The Dirty Life