Nomadland, author Jessica Bruder's 2017 travelogue bestseller, tells the stories of the Americans who have either chosen or been forced to hit the road - living in vans and taking seasonal work in everything from US National Parks to Amazon's CamperForce programme.
Bruder's book is also the inspiration for director Chloé Zhao's Oscar-winning film that sees Frances McDormand playing the fictional character Fern alongside Linda May, Charlene Swankie and Bob Wells - real-life people that Bruder befriended on her travels.
At an online roundtable event, the author talked to Harry Guerin and other journalists about her book, the film, and a different way of life.
I have always been super, super interested in subcultures, these non-blood families.
What the writer Armistead Maupin would refer to as logical rather than biological families. People who find each other and kind of end up sharing space in a world that is different from the world many people know. So, when I learned about all of the jobs that people were taking on the road - a whole circuit of labour that I'd never been aware of - I was fascinated, I was curious and I wanted to see for myself. Also, who doesn't have an escapist fantasy about getting to run around and talk to people?
Having written Nomadland, I knew it might take years to see it become a film, if at all.
Many of my dear friends write books and I know several of them who've had their work optioned [for the screen], only to see it shelved and to hear nothing but crickets. I was joking with them that at the beginning of the process I put myself on a strict diet of low expectation. Also, I didn't talk to people in the book about it because I didn't want to get anybody else's expectations in a high place. Nobody warned me [that it could take years], but thankfully nobody had to. Thankfully, even if they had've warned me, it worked out.
I came into it with the attitude that I'm a journalist, I'm a non-fiction book writer. Film is a very, very different thing to tell stories in different ways.
I'll be honest: I did not hope that it [the film] would be completely literal - 'This happens in the book and then it happens on the screen'. I didn't want it to be like one of those maps of dance steps from the 1960s, where it's like you put it on the floor and they're doing exactly the same dance every time. Honestly, I didn't look at it like, 'Where's this? Where's this?' because I expected it to be a composite. I was just interested to see where they would take it.
I'm biased - I am not an objective viewer of the film.
It opens in Empire, Nevada. I was reporting there for the first time in 2011. The guy that Fran's [Frances McDormand] character hugged is somebody I've known since then. So, for me, it's probably a different experience than for the typical viewer. With so many of the locations that I've reported in by myself, and then [seeing] so many of the people who are in the book - I thought it was lovely. For me, one of the most thrilling things was to see Linda, Swankie and Bob onscreen getting validated for telling versions of their stories. These are first-time actors at a point in their lives where most people don't try something like that for the first time. I thought they were fantastic.
So many people come to me about the book and say, 'Oh, they must all be the people who voted for Trump'.
It's hard to talk for a whole subculture - I'm one person and I got out and saw as much as I could - but I did not see heavy politicisation. Again, I was reporting in the pre-Trump era when everybody didn't talk politics at breakfast, lunch and dinner. It was really a different time. In a lot of the spaces where I spent time with people, it was kind of a quiet agreement that the things that brought them together were what they wanted to focus on and they didn't want to talk politics. It just wasn't a 'let's debate this stuff' kind of crew. I started referring to them in a strange way as almost post-political.
It's funny; I have friends on the far left who like to say with the government, 'Same puppet, different hand'. So, I think for a lot of people it just almost feels like they don't think the government will really do anything that will be incredibly useful for them. They are focussed so much on doing what they need for themselves that thinking about, you know, who's in office is almost secondary. Again, that's my take. I can't speak for all of them, obviously. But it wasn't like there was a bloc of Trump voters or something like that.
Because I spent so much time when I was undercover at Amazon's CamperForce by myself, I think the things that I learned about human nature came more from interviewing people who were doing that kind of work, rather than doing it myself.
What I learned is people - in this demographic, particularly - really felt grateful to have the work, even if sometimes the treatment wasn't so great. I met one woman who was injured on the job. Her attitude was, you know, she didn't get paid for the time she was convalescing, but her attitude was still she was so thrilled that she didn't get fired. In my mind, that really just shows us where we are in terms of people's expectations. Maybe we're all on a steady diet of low expectations in the culture in terms of what's available for work.
I miss the wide-open vistas of the West.
I miss that sense of possibility you feel out there, and how small you feel out there. How you feel you're part of something larger just by being there. It feels good for the psyche. I think a lot of people on the road feel that way too and they don't get used to it in a way that they forget. Swankie is always posting pictures on her Facebook of sunsets and beautiful things in the desert and plants and rocks and all sorts of stuff.
The nature's amazing; the nature can also be challenging. I remember when I was first camping with Swankie it was going down into the 20s at night and we didn't have great ways to heat our vans. I did what Swankie was doing at the time, which was if I woke up cold, I started the van, I ran it for a little while, and then I bundled up and got back into bed. I remember through the night just hearing this kind of rolling - one engine would come on for a bit and then another. That can be the challenging part about nature: nature isn't always in it to help you out.
Everything about influencers and #vanllife kind of cracks me up.
I've seen people posing with, like, a beer in front of a nice vista and taking lots of pictures of themselves. Maybe that just makes me sound old that I think it's really weird! With #vanlife, I kind of think of it as more of a brand than a movement. Even among younger people, there are very few who are getting corporate sponsorships that are paying to keep them on the road - you know, they've got the microbus and a hula hoop and they're doing a yoga pose on the beach in front of a sunset!
Again, a lot of it we see on Instagram is aspirational rather than accurate, so I kind of think it [#vanlife] is part of that. For everybody who is actually doing #vanlife and living off of sharing their experience with other people, there are thousands of people who have other reasons for being on the road, or reasons that are more complicated than that.
I didn't do any arm-twisting to have people from the book appear in the film.
I think it was more organic than arm-twisting. In the beginning, we didn't know and Chloé hadn't decided if anybody [from the book] was going to be in the film or not. That started evolving and I remember they were asking me, 'Can you help us find extras?' And then there was, 'Do you think Linda would be good on camera?' One of the things that made Linda such a joy to follow as a journalist was that she was really un-self-conscious. Linda wasn't turning it on for me or anyone. She was the same person when I had the recorder on that she was when she was being a campground host or anyone else. I hoped that that lack of affect would translate to the camera. That's what I told Chloé - 'I don't know what makes somebody good onscreen'.
I remember calling Linda and saying, 'This woman, Chloé, wants to come visit you', and Linda saying, 'Oh no! I've got to clean up all my stuff!' Me saying, 'Well, she doesn't have to come, Linda. This is stressful; I don't want to stress you out', and Linda saying, 'No, no, it's ok'. Chloé went out there [New Mexico] and that's when she first met Linda and also Swankie - Swankie was staying there.
I had this sense where I was getting them involved in something and that I obviously was familiar with Chloé and Fran's past work. I obviously know that in a sense more than I know them - I know them through their work. I am an admirer of their work, and their work suggested they would probably create something that I think we could all be proud of. But, you know, it's scary to also expose people that you've come to care about to a set of circumstances that you can't control, right? And that you don't know where it's going to go. So, I feel incredibly lucky that my instincts were reasonable on this; that they were into it, and that the film came out the way it did.
Nomadland is streaming now on Disney+. Jessica Bruder's book of the same name is published by Swift Press.
