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It amazes me how much I have in common with Linda Tirdao.

I, like Tirado, had a caring family and a relatively privileged upbringing. I, like Tirado, spent my 20s taking low-paying jobs and making shitty financial choices while living an ideal existence in Europe. And as with Tirado, shit got real when I had a child.

But there, alas, our paths diverge. I returned to the USA and turned my writing into a side business while I went to graduate school. When shit hit the fan during my second year of grad school and I really was in poverty (not the chosen kind this time), I learned a valuable lesson: no one owes you a damn thing, so be grateful for the friends and communities that help you, and work your ass off to get out of it.

Linda Tirado, instead, kept working minimum wage jobs, found out she couldn't live off of that salary with kids in tow, and got all grumpy. She also figured out that working, parenting, and attending college is really hard.

Then she wrote (an untrue) stereotype-laden essay claiming to be in poverty, promoted it on Gawker, set up a GoFundMe and collected $80,000 from well-meaning but gullible readers who believed her story. Tirado then did some backpedaling, meandered, and somewhere in a rambling update on GoFundMe ($80,000 later, mind you) mentioned that she's not actually poor, had grandparents who had bought her a house, etc. etc. Perhaps she admitted to not being poor because more careful readers had already begun .

In any case, the original publishers of her essay stammered out something like a retraction, Tirado walked away with a book deal, took a trip to Vegas without her kids, got some new tattoos, wrote her book, and has somehow been dubbed "The woman who accidentally explained poverty to a nation." (Maya Angelou must be turning over in her grave).

And what does all of this have to do with the book? Let me put it this way. I've been Linda Tirado: spoiled, entitled, and aghast at just how much it sucks having to work for your money. But Linda? Your whole poverty kick? Don't bullshit a bullshitter.

Reading this book just created an obnoxious argument between my brain and the words on the page. Every. Single. Thing. Is. Wrong. Well, wrong, or completely embellished.

The book doesn't have the meth-induced rambling quality of Tirado's internet essays, and for that, I'm grateful to whoever edited the damn thing. But can the boys at Putnam bother to hire a fact-checker, or give the job of spotting bullshit to a non-millennial? Please? Here are a few of my favorites:

--Tirado is outraged that contract work deprives people of a regular salary and benefits. Um. What is she even talking about? Contractors earn more than salaried employees precisely because they pay for their own benefits. And guess what? Contract work gets a lot of people in the door and into full-time, permanent positions with companies that otherwise wouldn't even have interviewed them.

--Continuing on the contractor rant, Tirado's assumption that FTEs are better off than contractors because of "job security" is nauseatingly naive. A full-time employee can walk into work on any given morning and be laid off for no reason at all. At least contractors have definitive start and end dates. But I guess for Tirado to know any of this, she'd have to have worked a real job...which probably isn't necessary when your grandparents buy you a house.

--Equally irritating is Tirado's assumption that salaried employees with benefits are better off than minimum wage workers with crappy benefits. In fact, Tirado discusses at length the "humiliation" of working your ass off while remaining poor. Linda. Dear. Don't ever assume anything about anyone else's financial state. Ever. There are people who work their asses off, have benefits, make $80,000 a year, and are in financial dire straits. Don't believe me? Think about single parents. Think about people living in high cost of living areas. Think about student loan debt. Car payments. The cost of childcare. Think about medical bills, or better yet, people with kids who have huge medical bills. If Tirado had any understanding of work, money, and paying for shit herself, she might be surprised at how quickly any of the aforementioned scenarios eat up a fat salary...and just how many in the top 25% of earners are one paycheck away from the street -- that is, no better off than the working poor she whines about. No, Linda, I'm afraid the rest of the world doesn't have it better than you, after all. :(

--And you've gotta love Tirado's attitude towards work. She bemoans the fact that she's been told contradictory things by her bosses (i.e.,"Use more coffee but save more coffee.") And she also doesn't like that companies make her recite lines to customers, which she claims is paying her to "pretend I'm not me and that I care about you." Sigh. Being given contradictory instructions by the boss? Being asked to act in a professional manner towards customers? Yeah. I guess I call that work. I guess I call that part of the job. Work sucks, for sure. Know what sucks more? Not having a job.

And when she's not making asinine assumptions that the world just has it so much better than she does, Tirado twists the truth in ways that made me wish I had a wood-burning fireplace for this book to call home. Examples?

--She supposedly knew a stripper who got fired for not having good enough breast implants. Really? That's funny, because until 2012 when dancers started suing, strippers were always independent contractors -- not club employees. The strippers paid the club to be able to dance there. Strippers' dues were a huge source of a club's income, and they didn't get fired, for fuck's sake. Dancers were barred from working only if they owed back rent to the club. As for the story of being fired for a bad boob job? Sigh. Strip clubs are dark -- the only illumination comes from dim red lights, purposely chosen because they mask every physical flaw. In that environment, no one is going to see the silicone leaking. And in an industry where fucking customers for money and blowing lines in the bathroom are no biggies, trust me, you're not getting fired for your tits. Someone is lying here, and given her track record with the truth, I'll wager it's Linda.

--She says college didn't make financial sense for her because it was so expensive. What does make financial sense, then? Not investing the time and money into working your way toward a degree and a better life, and thus remaining poor? Heh. When I was in grad school I knew at least 3 other single mothers pursuing their undergrad degrees...but nevermind, college doesn't make sense.

--Tirado says, "I don't smile. Someone found a picture of me smiling from back in 2006, before my front teeth went and a wisdom tooth cracked off." Fuuuuck me. This time last year, wasn't it a that knocked out all of her teeth? When a person can't even keep her own lies straight, she's not worth my time.

Yeah. This kind of arguing back and forth with a book, written by an author whose credibility is already less than zero? I couldn't take it.

I mean, why not write something useful? How about suggesting that we start teaching economics and money management to middle-schoolers, and reiterating to the next generation that minimum wage cannot be their life plan? How about suggesting things that communities can do to help people get the skills to get off the minimum wage?

Of course, Tirado gives us none of this. I can't say I'm surprised.

The book gets one star for being the physical proof that my fellow Gen Y-ers really are a generation of self-obsessed, lazy, entitled a$#%les who don't want to work -- and for proving that in the publishing world, you don't need talent...just a sentimental sob story and a few gullible readers.

SUCKED.