Finalist for the National Book Award Finalist for the Kirkus Prize Instant New York Times Bestseller Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, New York Post, BuzzFeed, Shelf Awareness, Bustle, and Publishers Weekly An essential read for our times: an eye-opening memoir of working-class poverty in America that will deepen our understanding of the ways in which class shapes our country and “a deeply … working-class poverty in America that will deepen our understanding of the ways in which class shapes our country and “a deeply humane memoir that crackles with clarifying insight”.
Sarah Smarsh was born a fifth generation Kansas wheat farmer on her paternal side, and the product of generations of teen mothers on her maternal side. Through her experiences growing up on a farm thirty miles west of Wichita, we are given a unique and essential look into the lives of poor and working class Americans living in the heartland.
During Sarah’s turbulent childhood in Kansas in the 1980s and 1990s, she enjoyed the freedom of a country childhood, but observed the painful challenges of the poverty around her; untreated medical conditions for lack of insurance or consistent care, unsafe job conditions, abusive relationships, and limited resources and information that would provide for the upward mobility that is the American Dream. By telling the story of her life and the lives of the people she loves with clarity and precision but without judgement, Smarsh challenges us to look more closely at the class divide in our country.
Beautifully written, in a distinctive voice, Heartland combines personal narrative with powerful analysis and cultural commentary, challenging the myths about people thought to be less because they earn less.
“Heartland is one of a growing number of important works–including Matthew Desmond’s Evicted and Amy Goldstein’s Janesville–that together merit their own section in nonfiction aisles across the country: America’s postindustrial decline…Smarsh shows how the false promise of the ‘American dream’ was used to subjugate the poor. It’s a powerful mantra” (The New York Times Book Review).
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You might think that a book about growing up on a poor Kansas farm would qualify as ‘sociology,’ and Heartland certainly does.… But this book is so much more than even the best sociology. It is poetry—of the wind and snow, the two-lane roads running through the wheat, the summer nights when work-drained families drink and dance under the prairie sky.
For me, reading Heartland was a heart-breaking, evocative experience that brought back my childhood and young adult years, spent on a farm and in a small rural community on the plains of Indiana and Illinois in the 1940s and 50s. Smarsh’s memoir, subtitled “Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth” brought back my own personal memories of old, cold farmhouses on a windy prairie, weekly Fidelity Loan payments MORE: https://susanalbert.com/bookscapes-review-of-heartland-by-sarah-smarsh/
On the order of Hillbilly Elegy and Educated, the life in rural America is thoughtfully explored in this memoir. The realities of limited resources in small towns clash with warm hearted stories of close knit families and neighbors helping neighbors.
If you want to understand why people vote against their own interests – decade after decade – you should read this book.
Heartland poignantly reveals a much neglected social layer of our population, that of the white lower income. while the plight of minority races is well known. The gross denial of these millions of, not of color, people who are forced to live inpoverished without their needs, such as severe malnourishment, lack of adequate medical care and other basic necessities being recognized or acknowledged. Heartland does great service to this problem and is a wonderful read.
As a native Kansan, I liked the portrayal of Midwesterners in this.
I am older than the author, but this memoir resonated with me. My family once farmed about an hour and a half from where she grew up. There was early childbearing, multiple marriages, domestic violence, and poverty. People worked really hard for very little money. This tale is well told.
Poverty is everywhere in America, but focused most intently on women with young children. That’s a fact. How one deals with this depends on how deeply one feels it in their everyday life. If you were raised a poor white girl in rural America by poor people your perspective is naturally both raw and personal. Sarah Smarsh faced it square on in the wind-swept wheat fields of Kansas in the 70s and 80s, a true period of agricultural and rural decline. A lot of what she has to say about America’s attitudes toward women and poverty is whip-smart in a real and raw way, Listen up, America.
I loved many things about this book. Told as a personal memoir it is one woman’s experience inside a paycheck to paycheck dysfunctional family plagued by generations of teen pregnancy, mental illness, and addiction.
On a larger plane it is a socio-economic tale of much of what’s wrong in America’s social and political failures in dealing with rural women and children and their needs within an unchecked capitalistic system.
Smarsh is at her best when she assembles her arguments from her heart, pulling from the rawness of what she herself saw and felt: “The horror of being financially reliant upon a man who hits you, blows town, cheats on you, disrespects you, and generally works less than you do was so deep in the women I knew that I understood it by proximity.”
The book does have a major short coming that dulls its otherwise vital and pressing message about a nation in social decline and default in providing for women and children:. The author too often lapses into a faux voice where she speaks to her unborn daughter. These transitions are jarring and are an artifice that editing should have removed. At first I thought she had a miscarriage or a daughter who died young. I’m not sure why this narrative artifice was employed—? too try and appeal to women readers?—but it weakened the work tremendously. It was doubly ineffective because in the end the author describes herself as someone who even as a child never wanted children.
I found many of the insights in this book in regards to America’s callous attitudes toward women sadly dead-on. The descriptions of what’s happening and how women in rural America feel about it vs how overly-educated male politicians see the situation are in line with my own observations … and this book is a treasure in that regard.
Local author and written about the area of childhood
It was an eye opener about the working poor in America. Ms Smarsh nailed the description of her family and the difficulties they faced. We read this for book club and each person found it relevant.
I was struck by the author’s personal understanding of her family history. Sarah Smarsh provides a compassionate insight into the roots of familial and generational poverty.
Smasrsh is an excellent writer who writes intimately and informatively about lives constrained by the forces of income inequality in spite of unremitting hard work. She includes solid information about the economic forces that keep working classpeople poor without resorting to charts and numbers and her own story is moving and illuminating.should be read by everyone who is interested in understanding the state of our country today.