Rust: A Memoir of Steel and Grit

I saw Eliese Goldbach being interviewed on CBS about her new book. While I currently live in Florida, I was intrigued by the subject matter as I spent most of my adult life in a suburb of Cleveland. Whenever we drove into downtown Cleveland by way of Rt. 77, we would pass the valley where Republic Steel was located and watch the smoke billowing out of its smokestacks below and all the time wondering what that was this all about. Over the years, yes, I had met individuals that worked in the steel mills either in Cleveland or nearby Lorain.  They were a mystery to me as I really did not relate much to their very different lifestyles than mine.  Very occasionally I find a book to read just a few pages and it has me captivated.  Ms. Goldbach's narrative was such a book. Her style of writing and substance is superb!  I found I could not put it down and found this book perhaps one of the most interesting pieces of literature I have come across in several years.  You are taken insides the belly of the steel mils, see what she saw of what it is like to have a job that has risk each and every day to make a living.  At the same time, you learn of how a lady with a Masters's degree in English can end up working in a steel mill and of her struggles with religion, politics, relationships and mental health. I found this intriguing and well written.  I give it 5 stars and highly recommend it.

Five stars, partly for the writing, partly as amulets for the author.There are two books here. The first is a biography of a Cleveland steel mill and its culture of long hours, often enervating, always dangerous, a changing crew of fellow workers making steel in obscurity.Virtually all the mill people mentioned are somehow damaged — by thoughtless classmates, by family, by trauma, by broken hopes. As a former steel worker myself, experience tells me this cannot be the general condition of the workforce. Curiosity, ambition, imagination, a thirst for the arts are not extinguished when the shift begins.Perhaps the employees she describes were chosen to underscore her own hard life and, by comparison, bring relief from the pressure of it. She writes that she and her co-workers had jobs providing “money without meaning.” Clearly true for her. Not necessarily for them, or the throngs of workers she never met.And this is where the second book, her autobiography, comes into play.Her life has been a maze of outrage. She was raped in college, forever in emotional pain because of it, and inflamed by the fact of the rapists going unpunished. She is bi-polar, never really sure when it will strike again. But it does. Often. With her dreams ebbing, she is a person of bad health and bad luck, holding a private rope of bad choices, barely kept from oblivion by a thinning membrane of faith.Yet somehow she found the will and courage to write about it. Often coarse and vulgar there is an enriching beauty in her struggle to love and to be understood. This is a book I hated to see end. It’s not only because it meant turning away from the writing, but also from a sense of walking away from the author. Good luck. Well done.

“With this long history of hard-won and hard-lost battles, it’s no wonder that the mill represents something nearly holy to the people who have lost their lives on the job. It’s a shrine to the men and women who have been killed or injured in the fight for better pay and safer working conditions. It’s a testament to the sacrifice and ingenuity that built a nation, but that’s not the story that people usually remember.”Quite simply put, this was not a great book. This was rather disappointing, as it was recently featured as a cover story in Cleveland Scene, so it’s probably the most talked about book in Northeast Ohio right now. My main problem with the work is that it’s not really a memoir about someone working in a steel mill; it is instead more a memoir about a woman’s life in general where she happened to work in a steel mill for a few years. The marketing, and even title itself, of the book is pretty disingenuous in this regard. It seems like the author wanted to write a memoir mostly about her mental health struggles, but kind of about her whole life (this includes a pretty brutal description of a rape and the ramifications which follow), but then knew this wouldn’t sell on its own, so she shoehorned the steel mill stuff in as a clever conceit. I have no doubt the publisher would tell you the title/subtitle was a masterful play on words, but let’s be honest, they were just getting cute. Also, I’m pretty sure the author just made stuff up for the purposes of telling a “good story.” For instance, have you ever heard of a hotel lobby keeping a cage full of mourning doves? Yeah, I haven’t either, because they’re big, wild animals, and friggin’ loud as hell. So she comes off as a liar, or at the very least, more properly a writer of fiction. I mean, memoirs are inherently subjective - they’re not intended to be autobiographies and no one seriously mistakes them for that - but still, you shouldn’t invent stuff wholesale simply because it helps you get your point across. On top of all of this, for a story ostensibly about personal growth, she somehow manages to finish the memoir even more self-centered than when she started, which all things considered, is really quite a feat.The writing itself fluctuates between unremarkable and captivating, usually depending on the setting the author is describing (the scenes in the mill are far more interesting than those without, such as recollections from the author’s childhood). An example of one such better passage is in relation to the famous orange flame which dominates the industrial valley heading into Cleveland from the south: “Every so often, the men and women stepped out into the dusk and looked up at the flame, which towered far above. Its color softened when you stood beneath it, as if proximity had tamed its orange rage, and you were left with a trail of gauze that lapped against the waning daylight, a testament to what we could create, what we could transform, what we could refine. When the pink of the sky finally faded and the edges of the skyline disappeared, the flame wagged its bright tongue at the darkness, burning away the memory of spot and grime and rust, lighting instead a vigil for the lives that were built and lost beneath it. If you looked at just the right angle, the sight of that flame could take your breath away. In its light, the mill seemed almost sacred.”Unfortunately, I just don’t think the author did all that great of a job capturing the character of Cleveland, especially as something intended for a national audience. There is a lot of the “woe-as-me” sensibilities that the country as a whole may have when they think about Cleveland, and maybe which sells, but that also hasn’t really been accurate for the past decade or two. Real estate downtown is booming, and there are far more jobs in Cleveland related to healthcare than steel production. Really, though, where this book suffers the most is it frequently comes off as more a travelogue than a true memoir. Exploration of life in the steel mill often felt surface-level, and at the end of the day, the author probably just didn’t spend enough time there to have a more material and fuller understanding the people inhabiting that place.

Not sure what kind of book it was trying to be - a story about a woman working in the steel industry, a story about family issues, a story about lost faith, a story about sexual abuse, a story about politics, a story about all the people the author has come in contact with that disappointed her, a story about mental illness. Depressing.

This was such a powerful book. All aspects of the authors life were so engaging. I loved reading about her challengers with bipolar, her religious feelings her relationships with parents and Tony and the life’s of the people who worked in the steelworks. Thank you for sharing your life with us.