Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

Finally, a memoir by someone who escaped moral and material poverty in the U.S.A. and who openly points at the elephant in the room: one lucky, focused, intellectually gifted child who makes it does not justify the puritan mentality that relegates the poor in a corner in the name of self-improvement. You can be a hard worker, with values and all, and still be condemned to a lifetime of shame, poverty and possibly substance addiction. Even if you are white!!! This is the most important legacy of the memoir: it is never (only) a matter of skin colour, religion, good will. IT IS A MATTER OF CLASSISM.
Here, I wrote it. No, SHE wrote it. And if you think that she cannot talk because she is white, read this other one
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He writes pretty much the same thing, but he is black. show less

Here's the woman's perspective of the territory claimed by Hillbilly Elergy. Although that story took place in the Appalachians and this is rural Kansas, it's all flyover country, to be avoided by coastal Americans. Smarsh is the scion of five generations of subsistence farmers, and was inspired at an early age to break the pervasive cycle of early pregnancy/non-profitable farming/alcoholism/domestic violence that infuses the matriarchy in which she is raised. Her motivation is not only escape, but love for an entity she grows inside herself, which she names August - a better self, not a child: “I loved us both so much that I made sure you were conceived only in my mind.”

The stories of her mother and father's mothers and fathers, show more and their mothers and fathers, are marinated in the concept so common to many Americans: don't get above yourself. And when getting above yourself means striving for a life better than the one your parents led, it's depressingly self-defeating. But Smarsh loves most of her relatives, and is never condescending in her recitation of the seemingly endless bad decisions that make hardscrabble lives even worse. She also does not shy from discussing white privilege, class, and race issues.

Quotes: “The defining feeling of my childhood was that of being told there wasn’t a problem when I knew damn well there was. If a person could go to work every day and still not be able to pay the bills, and the reason wasn’t racism, what less articulated problem was afoot? I wasn’t from a family or background anyone seemed to be rooting for. Our small town was almost entirely white, and in that context economics decided the social order. For my family, the advantage of our race was embedded into our existence but hard for us to perceive amid daily economic struggle.”

“Wealth and income inequality were nothing rare in global history. What was peculiar about the class system in the United States, though, is that for centuries we denied it existed. At every rung of the economic ladder, Americans believed that hard work and a little know-how were all a person needed to get ahead.”

“If you’re wild enough to enjoy it, poverty can contain a sort of freedom – no careers or properties to maintain, no community meetings or social status to be responsible to.”

“So much of childhood amounts to being awake in a grownup’s nightmare.”

“What it means to be “country” has changed in the few decades of my lifetime from an experience to a brand culture cultivated by conservative forces.”

“Receiving accolades for your academic work was an offense to grandmothers who had left school in tenth grade and were adverse to anyone thinking herself too good for where she came from.”

“No house is truly secure. The body is the only permanent home, and even that one comes with an eviction notice.” show less

Smarsh twines her personal story with research and reporting about the intersection of class, sex, politics, and education for a binge-worthy and eye-opening read. Her background and mine have little in common, but she bridged the gap as well in her book as she has apparently done in her life. It helps me understand better some friends and acquaintances whose lives have been more like Smarsh's. It doesn't bait or shame anyone.

When I first heard about this title, I grouped it with others on similar topics, and put off reading it. But our library district is encouraging the whole community to read it for One Community, One Book, so I picked it up and couldn't put it down. It's the best of its little subgroup. More clear-eyed than show more Educated, more beautiful than Hillbilly Elegy. show less

I thought this book was going to be just another one of those books published in 2016 about why rural Americans voted for Trump. But it’s not — it’s bigger yet more personal than that. I’m sorry I mis-cataloged it in such a way. Smarsh’s deep Kansan accent connects each perfectly crafted thought to the next, as though each paragraph, each chapter is exactly where it needs to be. Some sentences left me lingering, in awe over the power she has over language. Thank you for surprising me, Sarah. Come up to Nebraska!

What a powerful read! This book really connected with me. I also was raised in the Midwest, a generation before Sarah, and am from humble roots. That is probably where our connection would end since unlike Sarah, I was raised in a stable family with loving parents who were able to provide what I needed-both physical and emotional. Still, I found myself appreciating and understanding the life she describes as her own.
It's not comfortable to read about the struggles and continually regretful decisions of people living in poverty, but I think it's so important in understanding their challenges and often hopeless mindsets. How startling it was to me that it might be easier to just move when things don't go as planned or hope comes only in show more the possibilities of a new location. Sarah's family moved countless times, repeatedly disrupting her life and schooling. Yet, Sarah helped me to appreciate and respect her family's attempts to make changes and keep trying. Life is bleak when there is little hope. This is something that those of us who haven't lived in true poverty can't understand. Unsurprisingly, it breaks many people. Sarah's people were bent, but not broken. Sarah herself, found an inner strength and rose above, breaking the ties that bound her family to poverty.
The style of Sarah's writing is unique and genuine. The book is written as a letter to her unconceived child; the spirit of a girl that she called August. She was determined to not make the same mistakes as the generations of women before her by having a child when she was still nearly a child herself, so she created an image this potential child of her youth. Throughout her childhood and early adulthood this image became quite real for her, and she used it as motivation to never have her since that would certainly continue the cycle of poverty. Sarah's inner strength and gift of intelligence, along with encouragement from select teachers along the way, blossomed slowly into a life with better opportunities than those of her ancestors. She writes in such an honest and open way of her experiences, creating a real feeling of what it was like for the reader. It is hard, but vital to our future to try to understand what the cycle of poverty is, in order to someday find a way to create change and hope for a better life.
My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this title. Most of all, I thank Sarah for having the courage to tell her family's story (with their blessing) in such a moving way. I thoroughly recommend this title to all. show less

A big part of our problem in America is not about what we know and with what we are familiar; it’s how disconnected we are from the lived experience and reality of others. The only way to counteract this is to be willing to listen and truly hear from the experiences of others.

Sarah Smarsh has exposed and expressed herself and her family, the experience of living as poor, working-class men, women, and children in Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth.

The author writes as to an unborn daughter she often considered and thought about regarding what she would have experienced if born in a predicament similar to the author’s. The author is born in Kansas toward the end of the time of the show more “family farm” to people who worked the land for generations but whose children were now turning to find work in cities. Her life is constantly in and out of the Wichita urban and rural areas. She chronicled three generations of her family’s life: often the story of men who work hard but often do not have enough, and generally are abusive; the women who endure it for a time, can often find freedom from the abuse, but still constrained by poverty and thus who often find themselves back with abusive men or with family. Constant movement and a lack of settlement; constantly changing schools. The author threw herself into her academic studies and was able to overcome generational cycles by graduating high school without having a child; she went on to college and well beyond and “made it” into the American middle class.

But she does not spend her time judging her origins; she describes them all, and especially their pathologies, as the result of being poor. Their poverty was a choice - not theirs personally, but the choice of everyone else who prospered thanks to their efforts. As the author well attested, it was not as if she or her family members did not “work hard”: quite the contrary. But they were part of that “forgotten” world in the heartland, flyover country, the areas many in more comfortable surroundings look down upon with derision. It was always easier to blame her folk somehow as opposed to seeing the tragedy of how people in her family could work as hard as they did in the “land of opportunity,” the richest country on earth, but only to barely eke out a living.

I cannot personally relate to the author’s experience because I am at least one generation removed from it. Nevertheless, I have known the kind of people who populate the author’s life and story, and the story truly did resonate.

Sure, people in poverty often make less than wise decisions. But everyone does; the difference is how many of us who have the benefits and privilege which attend to some level of generational wealth find ourselves with resources and support systems which cushion those blows, and many who are in poverty do not share in that same privilege. But by the grace of God there would go most of us.

What we find awkward and uncomfortable remains what stares at us in the face in works like these: there are a lot of people who are working very hard in America - far harder than most of us - and the system has been designed to work to their continual disadvantage so they will never really get ahead. And the rest of us, directly or indirectly, benefit and profit from it.

We can, and should, do far better regarding the working poor. It need not be patronizing. But a stronger support system could mean the world for the incipient Sarah Smarshes of our country. And our nation would be a better place for it. show less

Maybe a 2.75. This is a serious, thoughtful, clear-eyed and intimate look at people who have been largely forgotten, ignored, misunderstood and misled: poor, rural whites in a "flyover" state. These are Smarsh's family, their lives and communities, where she grew up in south central Kansas. I've spent a lot of time in that part of the country: I've driven US 54 many times, camped and hiked at the Kingman state fishing lake, visited graves outside Admire, had a couple of short stories published set in this region. I recognize Smarsh's grandfather Arnie in our neighbor who stomps up the drive in shit-smeared sneakers and sweat-stained hat, who has reset our windmill pump and runs a few cows on our little acreage to keep the weeds down for show more us. But, Lord, what a hard life it can be. Especially for the women. Teenaged moms are almost the norm, though girls may be warned "You don't want to get tied down, you know what I mean?" Everyone works multiple jobs: farming and construction, waitressing and weighing wheat at the grain elevator, babysitting and cosmetic sales. These people *work*. And may be only a truck breakdown away from insolvency. They move. All the time. Marriages, divorces, abuse, lost jobs; the grandparents, aunts, uncles, in-laws, kids... they pack up and relocate into and out of each other's houses as they can or must. They are pretty much all addicted to something: alcohol, cigarettes, pills; depression and mental instability abound. Smarsh's indomitable grandmother Betty's mother once refuses her a loan of $75 to escape a brutally abusive husband, saying "You made your bed, now you lay on it." Betty decides then and there that if anyone ever asks her for help, she will give it. And she does. Smarsh also writes movingly of her gentle, atypically tender father: he was the one who brushed her hair for her before school, who left little poems for her, who ends up severely depressed and victim of a gambling problem, loyal to a second wife with a devastating pill habit. Smarsh decides early on that as much as she loves all these people and the Kansas prairie and the smell of the farm on a November night, she will not stay. And she doesn't. But this book is much less about her own struggles and wayfinding as it is a heartfelt look at these people and this life, and how circumscribed their options are. She notes somewhat bitterly that when she manages to get a scholarship to the University of Kansas intended for low-income, minority, first-generation students, the few other white students joke that they are the "white trash" recipients.

In spite of all the intensely personal, wrenching portraits Smarsh paints, the book may not grab as it should. It is unstructured, more than a bit chaotic. Her mother is "Mom" on one page, and "Jeannie" on another. The extended cast of grandparents, great-grandparents, sons, daughters, grandkids, nieces, cousins, nephews, in-laws, and a multitude of exes is confusing. She jumps back and forth in time, place, and family arrangements; incidents are told more than once. Perhaps this is deliberate, to evoke the tremendously chaotic and unpredictable leaps their lives make. But it leaves a sympathetic reader scratching her head: wait, didn't we hear that already? WHICH husband is it that took Betty's son from her? Oh, that's right, Dorothy is Betty's mother, the great-grandmother...but who's "Pud" again? It takes some perseverance. Finally, Smarsh hangs the entire book on the hook of a soliloquy directed to "you," a daughter she names August, who was never conceived or borne. She tells the stories of her embattled youth to this child, explaining to her: "This is why I never had you." It is irregularly invoked, and can tip into something that feels contrived and even maudlin. If this was the vision that kept Smarsh out of the life she fought long and hard to escape, more power to her. But it doesn't quite work as a literary device.

An important tale, not told well enough. But people should read it anyway. show less