“I’m upset about the gravy boat”, she announces next, “the comforter is too big for our washing machine”. But despite her self-awareness, Biss’s complaints about her unease at being a homeowner, and her frustration at having “too much”, quickly start to grate. Over the subsequent 300-odd pages, Biss proceeds to interrogate by turns the low-level malaise that consumer capitalism frequently provokes, and the unease she feels at her own participation within it how the continual accumulation of stuff can leave you feeling oddly dissatisfied, even as we are led to believe it should do the exact opposite the notion of ownership and how what we own defines us how we establish value (of people, of things, of time) in the context of an economic system that defines individual worth according to one’s ability to generate income and how artists are to operate under these conditions.īiss’s investigation is ambitious in its scope, though it takes shape around one clear organising theme: the author having bought a home – her first – and her subsequent discomfort with her own comfort, her awareness that the prosperity she enjoys as a middle-class white American is directly predicated on the impoverishment of others.

That initial question, posed by Biss’s husband as the pair return home from a disappointing trip to a furniture shop, neatly introduces her concerns. So begins Eula Biss’s latest book, Having And Being Had, a carefully crafted blend of memoir and cultural criticism that considers the contradictions and injustices of modern globalised capitalism.

“What does it say about capitalism, John asks, that we have money and want to spend it but we can’t find anything worth buying?”

Having and Being Had by Eula Biss