Trash!: A Garbageman's Story

Like the authors of some of my favorite recent memoirs—Hilary Peach's Thick Skin, Finn Murphy's The Long Haul, Charlotte Gill's Eating Dirt—Paré-Poupart had access to the class-elevating levers of education but found himself in a blue-collar trade and chose to stay for decades. In his case, that's hauling garbage in Montreal, hurling bags of trash into the back of his truck through the heat of summer and, especially, the ice and snow of the Quebec winter. He has stuck with it because he loves it: he has the "soul of a ragpicker," and glories in the "joyful chaos" of the intense (and often scorned) physical labor. But he kept up with his education too—the garbage work paid for it—and he turns his sociological skills (delivered with a trashman's foul-mouthed relish) to critiquing the social invisibility of his work and the excesses of our consumer society that our alley bins (and those who empty them) help to hide. It's a short, sharp, and eye-opening little book.