"Class Apartheid" in America (and cigarettes)

Mary in America · Jun 5, 2026 · 38m

Xochitl Gonzalez is a bestselling novelist, but, to me, she’s an economist. Her books are about collisions between economic classes; she captures precarity and luxury, access and scrappiness, often with gentrification as the site of these collisions. She has this freakishly astute lens because, she says, she herself has “changed economic classes,” not once but three times — an experience she’s now writing about in a forthcoming memoir.

Further Reading:

Last Night in Brooklyn

Need Blind: A Memoir of Class in America

“I Mean, Why Shouldn’t We All Smoke Cigarettes Again?”, New York Magazine

What…