These days, Monroe seems professionally wedded to a narrative of personal struggle and sudden dramatic changes of fortune, for better or worse. She has a huge Twitter following, regularly detailing physical and mental health challenges, struggles with alcohol, a rollercoaster love-life, and anecdotes that heavily imply that the wolf is never far from the door. She’s helped by a fluent writing style that cycles rapidly through a variety of clickable moods: cheerful resilience in the face of adversity, living-my-best-life showboating, sassy clapbacking, ruefully relatable parenting moments, and so on. In short, she’s the acceptable face of modern poverty in the eyes of many middle-class progressives — and they adore her for it.
[…]
Once you have unscrewed your face, consider that the real attraction of Monroe’s writing for readers cannot possibly be that it gives impoverished people genuinely delicious things to eat, still less that it saves them lots of money. After all, no amount of repurposing stale cornflakes or fiddling about with ring pulls is going to make even the smallest dent in household bills these days. Rather, the main appeal of Monroe’s writing is surely that it taps into an old and perennially satisfying literary tradition, which for want of a better term I’ll call Thrift Lit.
In this genre, fearless housewives — often abetted by a calm and steadfast husband with carpentry skills — marshal all their domestic forces against a hostile local environment. They build shelters, repurpose natural objects into domestic ones, find ingenious uses for old things, and waste nothing. […]
Viewed in this light, despite all the contemporary trappings (non-binary, tattooed, neurodiverse), Monroe becomes a surprisingly traditional figure, grounded in Puritan values of self-restraint and respectability: a castaway, pioneer, or farmer’s wife, ingeniously building a succession of bright, glowing homes for herself and her child out of nothing, in the midst of a punishing economic wilderness. The virtues to which she exhorts us by her own alleged example are thrift and frugality, not as means to any further ends but as wholly satisfying moral and aesthetic ends in themselves.
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