Trauma Survivors, Secret Keepers, and Goofy People with Hearts of Gold:
Social Workers in Contemporary Fiction

by Kiersten Marek

Novels about social workers are not plentiful and, in fact, I was not able to find any that feature Master's level social workers as their main characters. Why is this so? Laura Kalpakian's main character in Graced Land, provides one provocative answer to this question:

"Why are there all those cop shows on TV and not one about social workers? I'll tell you why! Because the poor people on cop shows, they're doing something about their situation! They're colorful and desperate! They're out there robbing banks or ripping off gas stations, forging checks, risking their lives to peddle drugs! That's who the cops get to deal with! Who does the social worker get to see? Day in, day out? Just a bunch of women who've screwed up their lives and don't know what to make of it, or where it all went wrong or how, except that they've been screwed, really screwed."

Emily Shaw, the main character and fledgling caseworker in Graced Land, says this in a fit of exasperation over her new job, but it's only one side of her rant, for the rest of her monologue goes on to praise one of the exceptions to her diatribe, the client whom she has gotten overinvolved with, Joyce Jackson. Joyce is not taking life as a welfare recipient lying down. Like many quietly powerful people, Joyce Jackson is a subversive: she is creatively finding ways to make money on the side, to give to those less fortunate than herself, and to live the way she wants to live, devoted to the music and the memory of Elvis Presley.

One of the striking things about Graced Land is the nuanced understanding that Ms. Kalpakian conveys for the social worker's plight: wanting to help, but being able to only help so much, lest we become "unprofessional" in our genuine caring for our clients. Emily Shaw is constantly stumbling over boundaries, moving between chatting with her clients like they are coeds in her esteemed sorority, the Tri-Delts, to taking them up on their offers to join them for drinks. While she gets categorized as "goofy" by some, she is not much more goofy than I was as a beginning social worker. While at times I cringed with self-recognition, for the most part I appreciated Kalpakian's gentle mockery of her novel's protagonist.

Joyce Jackson's 12-year-old daughter, Cilla, has a shrewd and convincing voice which shares the telling of the story with Emily Shaw's point-of-view. Cilla lives in mortal fear that she and her mother will be "found out" for their tag-saling and mending of clothes and cutting up of scrap material to make faux-antique quilts. Graced Land also has some colorful minor characters in the social work field including "Large Marge," Emily's supervisor, who is hell-bent on using her bureaucratic power to make miserable the lives of the uppity poor like Joyce Jackson. And there is even a social work Knight in Shining Armor waiting in the wings to save Emily from her destined-to-be-horrible marriage to Rick, who is away at law school prepping to join her father's law firm: