As a little girl in Cleveland, Eliese Colette Goldbach could often see the rust-colored buildings of the city’s steel plant in the distance when she rode through town with her father. Eliese Colette Goldbach. Current Page: Rust News & Reviews Bio Work Events Contact Open Menu Close Menu. Current Page: Rust News & Reviews Bio Work Events Contact Published by Flatiron Books 'This beautifully told, nuanced memoir will. Eliese Colette Goldbach is a steelworker at the ArcelorMittal Cleveland Temper Mill. She received an MFA in nonfiction from the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts Program. Her writing has appeared in Ploughshares, Western Humanities Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and Best American Essays 2017.
'A female steelworker's soulful portrait of industrial life. Goldbach's evocative prose paints a Dantean vision of the mill..but she discovers in the plant’s quirky, querulous employees an ethic of empathy and solidarity that bridges ideological divides. The result is an insightful and ultimately reassuring take on America’s working class.'
—Publishers Weekly
'Bringing her perspective as an outsider—both as a woman and a liberal—to this insightful account of the steel worker's lot, Goldbach displays refreshing candor and hard-earned knowledge about the issues that divide us and the work that unites us.'
—Booklist
'Goldbach turns in a gritty memoir of working in a steel mill while wrestling with the world beyond.. An affecting, unblinking portrait of working-class life.'
—Kirkus Reviews
'There have been a lot of books written about life in industrial cities in the Midwest, but relatively few written by people who actually live in them, and few so heartfelt and unsparing. Rust is at once a unique memoir and a broad indictment of America's broken promise that anyone who came of age in the 21st century will find painfully familiar.'
—Sarah Kendzior, New York Times bestselling author of The View from Flyover Country
'Beautiful.'
—Charlie LeDuff, New York Times bestselling author of Detroit: An American Autopsy
'Rust is a soulful telling of America's stubborn and forgotten core. Deeply honest and defying easy sentimentality, this book heralds the arrival of a true talent.'
— Adam Chandler, author of Drive-Thru Dreams
“Rust is a memoir of steel and grit, yes, but soul above all, a young Cleveland millworker’s eloquent tale of hard times that plants its boots squarely on the bookshelf of American working-class literature.'
—David Giffels, author of Barnstorming Ohio: To Understand America and The Hard Way on Purpose: Essays and Dispatches from the Rust Belt
'Rust is a brave, heartfelt memoir whose pages overflow with hard-earned wisdom. Goldbach's story of embodying our national extremes--conservative vs progressive, religious vs secular, white collar vs blue--has endowed her with a singular ability to see through our partisan delusions and identify what, truly, unites us still as Americans. If your heart, like mine, feels poisoned by this era of political division, Rust may just be the antidote for which you've been searching.'
Eliese Colette Goldbach Rust
—John Larison, author of an Entertainment Weekly Best Book Whiskey When We're Dry
“The steel mill burns on in the heart of Cleveland, and in the pages of Eliese Collette Goldbach’s transformative debut. This is indeed a memoir of steel and grit, the extraordinary work of every ordinary day. But like all great stories, Rust is also a love story—about a craft, a city, and the communities we forge there. Goldbach reminds us that what we make in turn makes us who and what we are.”
—Dave Lucas, author of Ohioana Book Award for Poetry winner Weather
'A Spring 2020 must-read.. In the same vein as J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy and other post-election literature, the strongest components of Goldbach’s memoir rest on the keen observations of life at the steel mill, specifically as a woman in a largely male environment; how the identity of laborers is consistently exploited by politicians; and the myriad ways households are divided by hyperbolic political rhetoric.. Rust is a moving portrait of Goldbach's formative years, with gems of societal observation strewn throughout the narrative.'
—Paperback Paris
The American Dream is more like a nightmare for most Americans. Or at best it’s a series of sleepless nights, tossing and turning and trying anything to relieve the knots in your stomach. Specific to this subject, American millennials grew up in a media saturated environment that bombarded them with positive messages of The American Dream saying, “You Can Be Anything You Set Your Heart To!” or “Reach for Your Dreams!” Anyone who grew up in this era can recall those faded, crunchy, laminated posters propagating these oft-repeated “positive” messages on the walls of their public school. “Nothing Is impossible!” they probably said. Ctrl alt for mac.
Millennials were fed the American Dream by the gallon and the pallet, so they had little choice but to digest it. Eliese Colette Goldbach‘s debut,Rust: A Memoir of Steel and Grit, is the story of one descending into the depths of The American Dream and emerging with flecks of graphite dust on her cheeks, a master’s degree in her hands, and a few new friends.
On Its face Rust seems like it’s going to be an exposé of the American steel industry. I know when I read the initial short press for the book I figured I’d be reading something similar to Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, which was an exploration of worker exploitation and the effect of low wages on an individual’s livelihood. Nickel and Dimed is a great read and comes highly recommended, but Rust takes a different approach to the American economy. To her credit, Goldbach shines little but love on the Cleveland steel industry. She knows it’s the economic backbone to many lives, and because of this, it becomes the crux of this memoir as well.
You have to zoom out of the story to understand the context Goldbach wants us to explore here. She’s using her story to demonstrate some truths about the millennial generation in America. Millennials are not afraid of a challenge. Millennials are not necessarily entitled brats, and they’re not afraid of putting in their time, either. But they were told to believe some things about their future that did not seem too true when they came of age in the late aughts.
Early on, Goldbach recites a refined version of a thought she had as a child passing by the Cleveland steel mill, “…my generation had been promised a better future than the one contained inside the sulfurous buildings of Cleveland’s industrial valley. We weren’t supposed to settle for trivial jobs that would provide us with nothing more than a paycheck, and adults encouraged us to pursue something more than the drudgery of blue-collar work. If you can dream it, you can do it! They said. The world is your oyster! As a child I took the catchphrases and cliches to heart.”
From there we follow Goldbach’s journey from a high school student with a dream of living in a convent to a liberal post-grad with an academic dream to a steel mill factory worker living one shift from a breakdown. Throughout this trek, Goldbach battles with her past expectations, her present realities, and her future hopes. We follow as she nurtures and then tears apart a loving relationship. We worry as she struggles through mental illness triggered by past traumas and the strange, unrelenting hours of the industrial worker.
We see her fall, and we watch her build herself back up again. Fortunately we also get to laugh occasionally as she struggles with the nuances of the various factory jobs she trains for in the mill. Her ongoing battles with forklifts are especially hilarious.
And even if the book is not really only about the steel mill, the mill is still the center, and the people within are the heart. At one point in her story, Goldbach has met the time requirement to receive a rite of passage, of sorts: she gets to exchange her orange hard hat for a yellow hard hat, signifying she has officially made it in the steel mill. She expects some kind of bliss to build inside of her, but nothing really blooms: “…something was missing. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it at the time — and I didn’t want to dwell –so I turned to Sleepy Bear for approval.”
Through all the tragedy and financial triumphs, nothing was able to meet those lofty expectations she set for herself. Yet, those people in her life were reliable and they were gritty and they were always showing up for work, like Sleepy Bear, whom she worked with in a space she describes as a ‘shanty’.
Eliese Colette Goldbach Age
The mill eventually split them up, and she recounts the way she felt about him: “Sleepy Bear had gotten me over my fear of forklifts. He was there when I got my yellow hat. He guided me through the mill and made a steelworker out of me. Sometimes I even missed the way he snored.” Goldbach spent her first 30-something years pursuing The American Dream and never found it, but she did have a good old time watching a good friend nap. Maybe he was dreaming, too.