Heartland

June 1, 2018
Journalist Smarsh explores socio-economic class and poverty through an account of her low-income, rural Kansas-based extended family.In her first book, addressed to her imaginary daughter--the author, born in 1980, is childless by choice--the author emphasizes how those with solid financial situations often lack understanding about families such as hers. Smarsh, a fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, lived a nomadic life until becoming a first-generation college student. Smarsh vowed to herself and her imaginary daughter to escape the traps that enslaved her mother, grandmothers, female cousins, and others in her family. "So much of childhood amounts to being awake in a grown-up's nightmare," she writes. "Ours happened to be about poverty, which comes with not just psychological dangers but mortal ones, too." Because the author does not proceed chronologically, the numerous strands of family history can be difficult to follow. However, Smarsh would almost surely contend that the specific family strands are less important for readers to grasp than the powerful message of class bias illustrated by those strands. As the author notes, given her ambition, autodidactic nature, and extraordinary beauty, her biological mother could have made more of herself in a different socio-economic situation. But the reality of becoming a teenage mother created hurdles that Smarsh's mother could never overcome; her lack of money, despite steady employment, complicated every potential move upward. The author's father, a skilled carpenter and overall handyman, was not a good provider or a dependable husband, but her love for him is fierce, as is her love for grandparents beset by multiple challenges. While she admits that some of those challenges were self-created, others were caused by significant systemic problems perpetuated by government at all levels. Later, when Smarsh finally reached college, she faced a new struggle: overcoming stereotypes about so-called "white trash." Then, she writes, "I began to understand the depth of the rift that is economic inequality."A potent social and economic message embedded within an affecting memoir.

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Starred review from June 11, 2018
“Class is an illusion with real consequences,” Smarsh writes in this candid and courageous memoir of growing up in a family of working-class farmers in Kansas during the 1980s and ’90s. A writing professor and journalist whose work has appeared in the Guardian and the New Yorker, Smarsh tells her story to her inner child, whose “unborn spirit” allows Smarsh to break the cycle of poverty that constrained her family for generations. Smarsh was born to a teenage mother, and the women in her family were all young mothers who hardened and aged early from the work it took to survive the day-to-day. Smarsh writes with love and care about these women and the men who married them, including her father and Grandpa Arnie, but she also lays bare their hardships (for many poor women, “there is a violence to merely existing: the pregnancies without health care, the babies that can’t be had, the repetitive physical jobs”) and the shame of being poor (”to experience economic poverty... is to live with constant reminders of what you don’t have”). It is through education that Smarsh is able to avoid their fate; but while hers is a happy ending, she is still haunted by the fact that being poor is associated with being bad. Smarsh’s raw and intimate narrative exposes a country of economic inequality that “has failed its children.” Agent: Julie Barer, the Book Group.

August 1, 2018

Journalist Smarsh uses her background growing up in rural Kansas to illustrate the economic plight of the rural working poor. Born in 1980, her childhood was a time of increasing economic instability, especially for farmers. The "farm crisis" of the 1980s caused many who lost their farms to foreclosure to flee to the cities. Her family remained on the farm but lost their construction business. The women had been teenage mothers going back generations, and the author's reminisces are often addressed to the child she consciously chose not to have as a teen, the "child of poverty," in order to break this cycle. By interweaving memoir, history, and social commentary, this book serves as a countervailing voice to J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, which blamed individual choices, rather than sociological circumstances, for any one person ending up in poverty. Smarsh believes the American Dream is a myth, noting that success is more dependent on where you are born and to whom. VERDICT Will appeal to readers who enjoy memoirs and to sociologists. While Smarsh ends on a hopeful note, she offers a searing indictment of how the poor are viewed and treated in this country.--Caren Nichter, Univ. of Tennessee at Martin

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August 1, 2018
Growing up as one of the working poor has become a familiar theme of memoirs of late, but this book is more than a female-authored Hillbilly Elegy (2016). Smarsh employs an unusual and effective technique, throughout the book addressing her daughter, who does not, in reality, exist. Rather, she's the future that seemed destined for Smarsh, the same future that had been destined for and realized by all the women in her family. Smarsh comes from a long line of women who married young, survived with barely enough money, and continually scrabbled along with low-paying jobs while trying to stay one step ahead of domestic violence or eviction. All of this was to be her legacy despite the strong work ethic, self-sufficiency, and pride that also run in her family. Smarsh was finally able to climb out of difficult circumstances, but her story is a trenchant analysis of the realities of an economic inequality whose cultural divide allows "the powerful to make harmful decisions in policy and politics." Elucidating reading on the challenges many face in getting ahead.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)