This article was amended on 3 September 2022. “She was, she made clear, ready to go,” he said. I found that rather refreshing.”Īnnouncing his mother’s death on Twitter, Ben Ehrenreich echoed that point. It’s usually not called tragic because we do die at some age. “I really have no hard evidence about when exactly one gets old enough to die, but I notice in obituaries if the person is over 70 there’s not a big mystery, there’s no investigation called for. “That thought had been forming in my mind for some time,” she told the Guardian at the time. In 2018 she published Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer, in which she described coming to the realization that she had lived long enough to die. She brought her trademark clear-eyed reporting to the subject of her own mortality. She wrote an award-winning essay Welcome to Cancerland about the experience. She founded the Economic Hardship Reporting Project which supports independent journalists to write about their lives including in poor rural areas of the US.Įhrenreich, who acquired a doctorate in cell biology before she turned to social activism and writing, was diagnosed in 2000 with breast cancer. Later, she used her name and energy to try to give low-income and other disadvantaged groups a direct voice to tell their own stories. The book helped spread awareness of an economy in which it was necessary to work two or three jobs to survive, and acted as a catalyst of the minimum wage movement. In Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, her 2001 bestseller, she wrote an immersive experience of living as a low-waged worker in Key West, Florida. Her first book, published in 1969, Long March, Short Spring, was an account of the student uprising against the Vietnam war. Ehrenreich battled over a half a century as a writer committed to resisting injustice and giving a voice to those who were typically unheard.

New york times barbara ehrenreich