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Heartland A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth Sarah Smarsh 9781501133091 Books

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Heartland A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth Sarah Smarsh 9781501133091 Books

Last year I read Sarah Smarsh’s serialized long-form story in No Depression magazine about Dolly Parton. The writing in that piece was so good that I began following the author on Twitter, mostly so I could express my praise and appreciation directly to her and find out when she was publishing more work. That’s where I learned about Heartland and its impending publication. I preordered my copy and waited expectantly for delivery, hoping it would be as good as I wanted it to be.

It’s even better than that. This amazing book is one of the most moving and challenging memoirs that I know of. As a reader with a parallel upbringing on the Great Plains and a firsthand exposure to childhood on the margins of economic stability, this book resonated with me in a way that few others have.

The author tells the story of her hardscrabble Kansas family by addressing her unborn daughter directly, as if this book were written only for her to know the history of her rural forebears on the prairie in 20th century America. While initially skeptical of this approach, and wondering if it would become a distracting gimmick, I was immensely pleased to discover the beautiful payoff in the final chapter, as the genius of the design became apparent in a fantastic way.

The story of Ms. Smarsh and her people reminds me so much of the story of my own family, and I am encouraged and gratified to see the love, compassion, and brilliant insight this phenomenally gifted writer brings to this tale of economic disparity in the world’s richest nation. Everyone needs to read this.


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Heartland A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth Sarah Smarsh 9781501133091 Books Reviews

A good “slice of life” but not really an ethnography. It makes sense that the author got out because she avoided being a teen mom, but she seems to have paid her own price. The digressions to her never-conceived child were interesting and important, but got a little weird and weighed on the book at the end. Overall well-written and very with the read.
This book should have been more interesting and moving than it was, given its subject hardworking and basically honest people who can't seem to get ahead no matter how hard they work. It wasn't. Smarsh's description of her family plods on with monotonous (and repeated) descriptions of their characters, daily lives and predicaments, but never comes close to creating any emotional engagement with them. Smarsh's narrative device--telling the story as if she were talking to a spiritual unborn baby, or her own second soul instead of her readers, it's not clear--was phony and distracting. It doesn't add to the narrative and she sometimes drops it in favor of addressing her audience directly. Smarsh's attempt to ascribe mystical or spiritual powers to her family, as opposed to the dry intellectual power of academic elites, is just silly women who can tell which apples are crisp simply by holding a hand over them? Seriously?
For a deeper and more searing look at poverty in the US I suggest Nickel and Dimed in America (Ehrenreich), Deer Hunting with Jesus (Bageant), or New American Blues (Shorris). They are well written, biting, and engaging books. They make you care about the people they describe as well as about how their situation might be changed. Smarsh's book doesn't. I'm sorry I wasted my time and money.
Sarah Smarsh seeks to dispel misconceptions of the poor, the working class and rural dwellers -- three descriptions that could all apply to the same person -- in her new release Heartland.

Smarsh addresses the narrative to her would-be child, August, explaining to this imagined entity -- and in the process, to the reader -- the life Smarsh lived and how that impacted her decisions later in life.

The daughter of a teenage mother and a fourth-generation Kansas wheat farmer, Smarsh details what life was like growing up on a family-owned farm and experiencing life in poverty, even though she and many of her family never thought of themselves that way.

Though Smarsh does get into statistics and studies once in a while, the bulk of the narrative focuses on either her personal experiences or the experiences of her family members. And Smarsh's writing style is not one to pull punches or fall into talking points -- she is direct and to the point in illustrating the events that happened and their net effects on the people in question.

Heartland serves as an important lesson that there is more to life in a state such as Kansas than a label such as "red state" or "flyover country." It's more complex and detailed than that, and only by understanding the complexities involved can we truly come to understand what causes the poor, the working class and the rural residents to act the way they do -- and perhaps to find real solutions instead of resorting to labels.

Highly recommended read.
After I finished reading Hillbilly Elegy I was left with a feeling that the author just doesn’t get it. He thought that he made it out of rural poverty and therefore everyone should be able to do it if they just worked a little harder. Sarah Smarsh gets it. She explains poverty in rural Kansas and why it is a trap that is very few people make it out of. The alcohol abuse, moving many times, teen pregnancy are all explored in this memoir in a way that explains why this cycle continues and as she learned in college why it happens and how hard it is to move into the middle class. At an early age she decided she wasn’t going to follow in the footsteps of others in her town. She writes the book to her unborn child that she was determined not to have until she was ready. I learned a lot from this book and highly recommend it.
Last year I read Sarah Smarsh’s serialized long-form story in No Depression magazine about Dolly Parton. The writing in that piece was so good that I began following the author on Twitter, mostly so I could express my praise and appreciation directly to her and find out when she was publishing more work. That’s where I learned about Heartland and its impending publication. I preordered my copy and waited expectantly for delivery, hoping it would be as good as I wanted it to be.

It’s even better than that. This amazing book is one of the most moving and challenging memoirs that I know of. As a reader with a parallel upbringing on the Great Plains and a firsthand exposure to childhood on the margins of economic stability, this book resonated with me in a way that few others have.

The author tells the story of her hardscrabble Kansas family by addressing her unborn daughter directly, as if this book were written only for her to know the history of her rural forebears on the prairie in 20th century America. While initially skeptical of this approach, and wondering if it would become a distracting gimmick, I was immensely pleased to discover the beautiful payoff in the final chapter, as the genius of the design became apparent in a fantastic way.

The story of Ms. Smarsh and her people reminds me so much of the story of my own family, and I am encouraged and gratified to see the love, compassion, and brilliant insight this phenomenally gifted writer brings to this tale of economic disparity in the world’s richest nation. Everyone needs to read this.