Sarah P Jones is a writer for New York magazine and now the author of Disposable, a study of “America’s Contempt for the Underclass”. Her new book describes in relentless detail what Covid-19 did to those who could not afford to fight the virus – or even to cope – in a country where access to healthcare depends on what you can pay.
The book is also a work of personal history: its subjects include Jones’s grandfather, one of more than 1.2 million Americans killed by the virus.
“Telling my grandfather’s story, but also disclosing some of my own struggles of healthcare, our family struggle with economic security, because it’s informed the stories I wanted to tell as a journalist, and it informs the way I approach my sources … it seemed relevant,” Jones said.
“It was a hard balance to strike. I worked very hard to make sure that the book really was more about the people I was talking to and less about me, but it did feel like it was important for people to know why I was interested in the subject matter.”
Disposable is about sickness but it is also about work. For New York magazine, and before that the New Republic, Jones “had covered a lot of labor stories over the years, and of course, Covid was, among many things, a huge labor story with dramatic implications for essential workers who were really putting their lives on the line just to keep America running”, she says. She had been covering some of the protests by Amazon workers against their working conditions at the pandemic’s peak when her grandfather contracted Covid and died.
“He had led what I think is a fairly typical working-class life in America. Worked very hard, never made very much money, and then he retires and moves down to Virginia to be with us,” she continues. “Unfortunately, Covid cut those golden years short, and we didn’t have the money to protect him in the way that we wanted to. So that really got me thinking. My grandfather’s death was an individual tragedy but as a journalist I knew it was part of a much bigger story.”
The result is a comprehensive picture of ordinary Americans in extraordinarily trying times, many pushed to extremes by what Jones diagnoses as the “social Darwinism” of elites who refuse to attempt to build a fairer society and make healthcare affordable for all. The subjects of Disposable come from across racial and economic groups: they are Black, brown and Native American; they are urban, rural and from the white working class. Indignation at inequality and injustice runs through the book like a seam.
Jones’s book contributes to an evolving canon chronicling the struggles befalling the US working class. “Barbara Ehrenreich is someone I admire very much,” Jones said. “Of course I read Nickel and Dimed” – the late author’s 2001 bestseller about working undercover on the poverty line, subtitled “On (Not) Getting By in America” – “and I think, everything she’s ever written. And so I had her in mind as I was working on the book.”
She also cites Studs Terkel’s Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do, the famous 1974 oral history. “And it was such an honor to get a blurb from Beth Macy, a fellow south-west Virginian”, who wrote 2018’s Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America.
Covid struck under Donald Trump, then lingered under Joe Biden. Jones finished work on Disposable before the election last November. In her book, she considers what was at stake. Now, with Trump back in the White House and Republicans in Congress pursuing deep cuts to social spending, Jones is not optimistic.
“I think we’re going to see the Trump administration create expanded categories of disposable people in this country, rather than reduce them,” she said, bluntly.
While in 2016 and 2020, she says, the president’s base drew from what she calls “the American gentry”, in 2024 “he did make inroads among working-class people, and that’s something we really have to reckon with, especially if you’re on the left.”
She believes Covid played a significant role. “I think the pandemic did have this radical impact on on Americans, whether they lost somebody to Covid or they lost a job or not. I think it left people feeling very uncertain, very precarious, and they were looking for somebody who was going to address that.”
As a journalist, Jones has written about the killing of the United Healthcare chief executive Brian Thompson in New York City in December and the strong emotions it stoked. The case “briefly reinforced this conversation about health insurance in this country”, Jones said, referring to a media (and social media) frenzy centered on Luigi Mangione, the young suspect in the shooting, whose lawyer said this week he planned to use $300,000 raised online for his defense.
“I would have liked to see a more extended conversation, perhaps accompanied by actual political change, but that’s not what happened,” Jones said. “But I do think a lot of people didn’t understand where the anger was coming from, at least in the press. I think a lot of pundits were like: ‘Why are people celebrating this?’ And I don’t think [the killing is] something to celebrate, but I do think it’s something worth understanding. Especially after working on this book, I do feel I heard the anger, I heard the grief, I heard the frustration.”
We would all do well to listen, she says. “If you’re going to be a journalist, you really have to be able to put yourself in a person’s shoes to understand how they’re looking at things – whether you agree with them personally or not.”
Disposable is published in the US on Tuesday
