Back On Her Feet

In Flat Broke With Two Goats: A Memoir of Appalachia, Asheville writer Jennifer McGaha takes readers on a wild ride through disaster and triumph. 

The disaster is financial: her husband, an accountant and a part-time real estate agent, is hard hit by the housing collapse in 2008, and the income from McGaha’s adjunct teaching job and freelance writing is not nearly enough to hold back the avalanche of debts and back taxes barreling toward them. 

The triumph of McGaha and her family over adversity occurs in the second part of the book. Plagued at first by fear and anger, McGaha gradually faces up to their dire circumstances. She and her husband move into a run-down cabin. Though both of them continue working, mostly from home, they withdraw from their former middle-class life and undertake such enterprises as raising chickens and goats, gardening, and heating their home with the wood garnered from their rented homestead. As she connects with the land and the “old ways” of Appalachia, McGaha also takes strength from the roots of her mountain past, finding particular inspiration in her grandmother. 

Flat Broke With Two Goats will doubtless appeal to many readers who have invested a part of their lives in gardening and raising farm animals or who have longings to do so. McGaha’s stories of her chickens and goats lend humor to her tale along with a reminder of the tremendous responsibilities attached to these animals: their care and feeding, their births and deaths, their illnesses. In addition, McGaha describes her battles with wild critters: the tribe of mice living in the cabin walls; the copperheads and other snakes who make their way inside the house; the possum who invades the barn.

What separates Flat Broke With Two Goats from other comparable Appalachian memoirs, however, are not McGaha’s revelations about animal husbandry, but her depiction of her family’s financial crash. An old saying, attributed to numerous people, runs “I’ve been poor, and I’ve been rich, and rich is better.” To this adage some of us might add “I’ve been poor, and I’ve been in debt to my eyeballs, and poor is better.”

In 2016, the average household credit card debt among US credit card users was over $16,000. In addition, over 8 million Americans collectively owed over 83 billion dollars in back taxes. 

We rarely encounter these debtors in the media, most often because debt accrues shame and failure along with its interest rates. Those of us who have struggled with such debt hide our liabilities from our neighbors, trying to maintain a façade of our standard of living, concealing from others—and sometimes from ourselves—our descent into penury. 

By subtitling Flat Broke With Two Goats “A Memoir of Appalachia,” Jennifer McGaha reminds us that these failures don’t just take place in some far and distant city. They occur in every community from Wytheville to Weaverville, from Chattanooga to Elijay, and their effects, nearly always hidden by pride and shame, can be devastating.

McGaha, for example, recounts how the collapse of her family’s finances wounds her relationship with her husband, David, who tries to conceal the enormous sums they owe in back taxes out of pride and an unwillingness to worry his wife. At one point, McGaha leaves their strained marriage and straitened living conditions, and departs for the Midwest to teach at a university for a semester. Here she finds an oasis in her time of troubles and feels tempted to remain, but finally returns to her husband and their hardscrabble existence. Unlike some who separate and divorce because of money woes, McGaha shows grit by sticking to her family and husband in their hour of need.

McGaha unflinchingly details other sorrows and woes inflicted by such debts. Several times she returns home to find the power company has cut their electricity for failure to pay the bill. Bill collectors darken their door. Their van is repossessed. Eventually, they must give up their home and move to the cabin, which damages their relationship with the friends who sold the home to them. 

McGaha also recounts the human temptation to continue a style of living even when we recognize our bank account is crumbling. Despite their desperation, she and her husband decide to leave the youngest of their children, a rising high school senior, enrolled in an expensive private academy. At another point, she meets David for supper at Asheville’s Bouchon restaurant, where even light dining equals the cost of a tank of gas. 

McGaha also points out that an element of make-believe enters into such decisions. Often when in debt we simply wish away our bills and back taxes, as if they were unreal. As McGaha writes at one point, “you believe this is not actually a problem, that the money is there somewhere and your husband just needs to look harder to find it. And when the money doesn’t materialize, you are astounded, your fantasy world obliterated.”

By sharing her tale of debt and woe, McGaha offers comfort and hope to any reader facing such a collapse. When she and her husband hit rock bottom, their old life ends, but from the ruins a new life grows, one with strong bonds to the past as embodied in her grandmother. Of her, McGaha writes “She knew you could be happy with $4.57 in the bank if you were surrounded by people who loved you and people you loved. She knew you could make mistakes and get past them and that you could forgive the people you loved for doing the same.”

Flat Broke With Two Goats is an honest, brave book that deserves a place in any collection of Appalachian literature.