On a recent Sunday afternoon, Eliese Colette Goldbach sat down in a Cleveland deli, ordered coffee and a wedge salad, and, between slow bites, took questions about Rust: A Memoir of Steel and Grit (Flatiron Books, March 3).

It recounts her three years as Utility worker No. 6691 at the ArcelorMittal steel mill in Cleveland. That period of skilled labor, Goldbach said, aided her recovery after two men raped her—a newly arrived 18-year-old high school valedictorian—at Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio.

At 33, she teaches at John Carroll University but still finds herself scanning help wanted ads for crane operators.

How did you hit upon the title?

[The book] had a bunch of different titles. My [Flatiron] editor Bryn [Clark] suggested Rust, and it really seemed to fit. The working title was Better Than We Are, which was from a quotation in the book.

You write that you majored in English partly because STEM and calculus came so easily. Really?

That’s part of my Cleveland-ness. Life makes more sense when there is an obstacle in your way. It’s part of my Americanness too, that idea that you have to be working, have to be struggling. Look at all those Europeans with all that vacation. Please.

Did you keep a journal at the mill?

I started writing about the mill shortly after I started. I was overwhelmed by the sights, sounds, smells, and I thought it could be an essay, maybe timed to the 2016 presidential election. For a while I thought it might be a visual thing, like Anne Carson’s Nox. Then it went off into a lot of David Foster Wallace–y stuff, like McCain’s Promise. The essay got really long, and I realized I needed to find the story arc. My agent [Sarah Levitt] was really good at directing me. I knew my hospitalization [with bipolar disease] would be the climax. I had to figure out how to build up to that.

Did your parents or husband have veto power over any passages?

No. They haven’t read it. They’re reading it now. I am still nervous about my parents’ reactions, especially my father’s, because I talk about him a lot.

You dedicate this to your dad, a staunch Republican and retired pawn-shop manager, and your mom, a dental hygienist. Why?

I have so much credit to give my parents. They insisted my sister and I get good educations. My bipolar disease came on after the rape, and they were always there for me. They found me in the hospital, they gave me emotional support, they helped me keep going. I wouldn’t have gotten to where I am with my writing if I didn’t have them behind me.

You left for college hoping to become a nun, and then the sexual assault and mental illness reshaped your identity. Do you have a faith walk now?

My parents are very religious; they are always trying to get me to go to Mass. I did go at Christmas. For some time, I have felt the pull of it—the ritual, the beauty that I was brought up in. A couple of years ago, I started going more regularly. [My husband] Tony has been a big part of it. We encourage each other. It is a way for me to humble myself, and it gives me a spiritual practice within the way I was raised. Others have different paths.

Would you be willing to read from Rust at your Catholic girls’ high school?

It’s closed now but absolutely, I would love doing that at other high schools. I really loved my all-girls education; I really did. Nothing was off-limits to us….One of the things I loved about my mill job was the uniforms are androgynous. You could be seen not in a sexual way. And there is something very comfortable and powerful about that. In high school, with all the girls dressed in the same thing, that frees up a lot of mental energy.

What is Rust saying about this region?

So often we are seen as one thing in the Rust Belt. There are books that answer that: Detroit: An Anthology and David Giffels’ The Hard Way on Purpose and Sarah Smarsh’s Heartland. Trump sees us as just one thing: down and out. But that isn’t the mill’s identity. It’s not just economic: It’s about pride, relevance, country, union. The steelworkers are still so strong.

Karen R. Long manages the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards for the Cleveland Foundation.