“We’re now in a position where it’s all hands on deck,” says Jessica Bruder, author and journalist, about the shock-and-awe policy revolutions under the second Trump administration. “I write about people who’ve been pushed to the margins, and there’s going to be so many more.”

Bruder is the author of Snowden’s Box: Trust in the Age of Surveillance (2020) and Burning Book: A Visual History of Burning Man (2007). But the work she is most famous for is Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century (2017), which explores the lives of the elderly who were disenfranchised financially after the 2008 crash.

Nomadland was optioned by actor Frances McDormand and its adaptation won big at the pared down, Covid-times 2021 Oscars, and set new Hollywood milestones. It won Best Picture, Best Director for Chloé Zhao, and Best Actress for Frances McDormand. This book is a fine representation of Bruder’s work: exploring the state of the relegated and forgotten.

“You always hope you’ll share the story of something that’s unfair and maybe it’ll get better, but that doesn’t always happen,” she says. “After I wrote Nomadland, the number of homeless in the US and particularly people living out of vehicles has gone up quite a bit.” The book came from a piece Bruder reported for The Atlantic. As an immersion journalist, she took up the nomadic life, tenting in an Arizona desert, spending time with RV (recreational vehicle) owners.

American journalist and author Jessica Bruder was in Pakistan last month to attend the Lahore Literary Festival. She speaks with B&A about her interest in writing about the marginalised and about present-day America

She spoke at last month’s Lahore Literary Festival (LLF) on an AI panel and another on statelessness. Bruder, who graduated from Amherst College and Columbia Journalism School, where she also teaches, explained how her creative impulses inform her work.

“My story ideas come from reading extensively and having a question that grabs me by the shoulder and will not let me go,” she says. “That was the case for the magazine story that turned into Nomadland.”

As a journalist, she continues, “you get to be a student forever. You get to ask questions that no other circumstances would give you the audacity to ask, and you get to learn forever, and you get to share that through writing.”

The author is fascinated by subcultures, how adversity and common interests band people together, allowing a unique perspective on mainstream homogenising culture. “And I think that’s happening here [under Trump],” she says. “Wages have been flat while rents keep going up, people have nowhere to go, and the idea that somehow [homelessness] should be a crime when it’s really a failure of our system as a nation — that is really disturbing to me.”

Another example of the criminalisation of people’s misfortune and forced deprivation of options is the aftermath of the US Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs case. Bruder’s 2022 piece, ‘The Abortion Underground’, in The Atlantic is being expanded into her forthcoming fourth book. “I’m on a book deadline and my agent is not thrilled that I took time out to come to LLF, but I’m thrilled to be here. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”

The Atlantic piece is about the underground network of pro-choice workers trying to save women’s lives. “It got more press than anything I’ve ever done, except for Nomadland, because the Supreme Court decision came out a month or two afterwards,” she says. “The people in these underground networks, they want people to know they exist because, otherwise, nobody can access the networks. But they also don’t want to get arrested.”

She had to be equally delicate with her last book Snowden’s Box. “When I was reporting Nomadland, the Snowden events were also unfolding and I received, in May 2013, a cardboard box, which unbeknownst to me, contained the entire national-security archive, direct from Edward Snowden.”

The contents of the biggest US intelligence leak since the Pentagon Papers literally landed on her doorstep. “Every important piece of communication relies on trust. Snowden was a very analogue story about a very digital circumstance.”

Surviving the next few years will rely on trust and resolve. She says people had already started preparing for the worst, another Trump term. “It was a subculture of its own,” says Bruder. “People were getting ready to help others even more. If you think about people who have been, in particular, victims of domestic violence or poverty and people who are not ready to have a child, they knew that many would be in emergency circumstances soon.”

How does a US liberal maintain their sanity? Bruder says it’s vital to focus on one issue at a time. “I think people are overwhelmed. Whenever I speak with people who care, I tell them, pick one issue and see what you can do that’s concrete to help people or to create change,” she says. “But you can’t try to do everything. And if you try to focus on everything, you will not get out of bed in the morning, because it’s just too much.”

The changes being rammed through by Team Trump are dangerous, and they are distracting by design. Take the over-discussed dynamics between the world’s most powerful man and the richest, Elon Musk. “He is basically disembowelling the entire government,” she says. “We think he’s a maniac and a narcissist, which I would also say of Trump.”

People around the world are waiting for the other shoe to drop. “It’s weird to see Trump let anybody upstage him. He doesn’t tend to get along with people for very long and, because they’re both narcissists, there’s going to be drama.”

Like other bastions of humaneness, Bruder is willing the post-Trump years to be a kinder time, one in which these unfolding policy disasters will be a distant memory. “When I write about people who I think have been unfairly pushed aside, I always hope that my work will become irrelevant,” she says. “I hope people will look [at the Trump years] one day and say, this is so crazy. I can’t believe that things were that way.”

As the world braces for more instability, Bruder and those who share her ideals have their work cut out for them in documenting the human cost of political inhumanity.

The interviewer is a freelance journalist based in Islamabad.

He can be reached at farisuddinahmed@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, March 16th, 2025