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Possum Living
How to Live Well Without a Job and with (Almost) No Money
After being out of print for decades, Possum Living: How to Live Well Without a Job and (Almost) No Money is being reissued with an afterword by an older and wiser Dolly Freed.
In the late seventies, at the age of eighteen and with a seventh-grade education, Dolly Freed wrote Possum Livingabout the five years she and her father lived off the land on a half-acre lot outside of Philadelphia. At the time of its publication in 1978, Possum Living became an instant classic, known for its plucky narration and no-nonsense practical advice on how to quit the rat race and live frugally. In her delightful, straightforward, and irreverent style, Freed guides readers on how to buy and maintain a home, dress well, cope with the law, stay healthy, save money, and be lazy, proud, miserly, and honest, all while enjoying leisure and keeping up a middle-class façade.
Thirty years later, Freed’s philosophy is world-renowned andPossum Living remains as fascinating, inspirational, and pertinent as it was upon its original publication. This updated edition includes new reflections, insights, and life lessons from an older and wiser Dolly Freed, whose knowledge of how to live like a possum has given her financial security and the confidence to try new ventures.
Praise
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Dolly
Freed is my hero….[If] this smart, engaging, funny, and frank manifesto…doesn’t
make you want to quit the rat race at least a little bit, then you must be one
big, fat rat.—Vice
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Compulsively
readable… One message comes out loud and clear. As the 18-year-old sage Dolly
Freed wrote: ‘I refuse to spend the first 60 years of my life worrying about
the last 20.’—New York Times Arts Beat
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Compulsively
readable… One message comes out loud and clear. As the 18-year-old sage Dolly
Freed wrote: ‘I refuse to spend the first 60 years of my life worrying about
the last 20.’—New York Times Arts Beat
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Dolly is a sharp writer, an autodidact and an 18-year-old of unusual competence and grit…There’s nothing precious about Possum Living: it’s genuine in a way few books are.
—Jezebel
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…this
book will not only make you laugh but might actually inspire you to embrace a
simpler life.—O, The Oprah Magazine
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Possum Living, a manifesto for living cheaply…is a relevant and sassy manual for the non-consumer lifestyle.
—Flavorwire
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An
elegant memoir.—Philadelphia City Paper
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A paean to self-sufficiency.
—Columbia Journal Review
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