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Biography & Autobiography. Sociology. Nonfiction. HTML:*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 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 worksâ??including Matthew Desmond's Evicted and Amy Goldstein's Janesvilleâ??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)… (more)
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Heartland drives home that the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” philosophy is hogwash. Sometimes the deck is just too stacked and the cycle of poverty nearly impossible to break. Smarsh herself managed to get out but after reading about her family, one understands why they did not. Comparisons have been made to Hillbilly Elegy and they are definitely similar. However, if you can only read one, choose Heartland. Smarsh is a better writer (sorry JD!) and she has more insight into the class divide and her family’s circumstances.
I listed to the audiobook of Heartland, which Smarsh reads herself. She has a pleasant voice with just a hint of a Southern accent that made this book an enjoyable listen. Recommended.
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 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.
Most of the book relays how difficult it was for her single mother, grandmother, aunts to have any stability as they married and divorced violent men. A couple of them had some stability in middle age with jobs in the county court or marrying a local journalist, but most times they were living out of motels, sharing a trailer with another family, or working the family farm until someone else needed the rooms more.
The most interesting part of the book was how Sarah was often discouraged from excelling at school. Very few of her relatives graduated high school so the fact that in elementary school she was selected for a gifted program was difficult for them. They were ashamed of their own lack of education and told her to not think herself “above her place.” She worked multiple jobs and applied for college without any support or discussion with her family.
Since I just finished Prairie Fires I picked up on the similarities towards government help 100 years later. In both books they perceived government help with laziness, but they worked multiple jobs at a time often with lots of physical labor. They would never be lumped with the “lazy” and do something so shameful as getting food stamps or assisted housing. Her best quote regarding her families beliefs “financially comfortable liberals may rest assured that their fortunes result from personal merit while generously insisting they be to taxed to help the “needy”. Impoverished people, then, must do one of two things: concede personal failure and vote for the party more inclined to assist them, or vote for the other party, whose rhetoric conveys hope that the labor of their lives is what will compensate them.”
Smarsh 'combed through public records, old newspaper, letters, photographs, and other archives to piece together a family history from the
Smarsh was born to a teenage mother on the plains of Kansas. Her birth was the next chapter in a story of teen mothers, domestic abuse, inter generational poverty and more. But is also a story of resilience, strength, tenacity and hope for something better.
Smarsh introduces us to the members of her family, with an honest and unadulterated voice. The emphasis is on the maternal members. I have to say, I was smitten by Grandma Betty. She is a force of nature, a rock to her family. Smarsh details her own family history, but also includes how government policies, programs and the economic climate over the years impact the working poor.
Smarsh has written Heartland with asides and ruminations to the child/daughter she will never have. (by choice). I did find this a bit hard to wrap my head around in the opening chapters. It continues throughout the book and although I understand she has broken the pattern and chosen not to raise another generation, it became a bit repetitive and lost it's initial impact.
As I read, I found myself nodding my head, as some of Smarsh's story is familiar to me - snippets of conversation, situations and hurdles to overcome. I always feel privileged to read a memoir, a telling of lives....
"With deepest reverence, thank you to my family for surviving, with humor and dignity, the difficulties that allowed this book to exist. When I asked for their blessing to tell our shared past, they bravely answered yes. Their reasons for standing behind my work, as they sometimes told me: Because it might help someone else, and because it is true."
Thank you Sarah Smarsh for sharing.
I know I'm echoing others by saying so, but the decision to address the book to an unborn daughter seemed awkward and needless. The same points about being a teenage mother living in poverty could've been made without the cloying and forced second-person narration that likely pushed away many readers.
Those readers who are from a similar place (politically, economically) may identify with Smarsh's narrative. Those far outside may be enlightened. As someone close (geographically), but on the outside (city dweller, anarchist), I was not all that engaged. Yet, despite my grumbles about narrative choices, there's ample evidence of great writing here. Had I come from a different place, I may have connected with this book more.
Also, I was left wanting to know what happened to the other members of her family in the end.
The stories of her mother and father's mothers and fathers, 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.”
So, that said, let’s try to be objective. It may seem at first blush that we have yet another GLASS CASTLE on our hands – look at my crazy childhood! Marvel at my wherewithal as I escape it! But this is one “growing up poor” memoir that is definitely different. Smarsh addresses the whole thing to “you” – “you” is the baby she never had; the unwanted, unwed pregnancy that would have sealed her fate, like that of her mother and grandmother before her, had she not made it her teenage life’s goal to graduate with a diploma in hand and no baby inside of her.
Furthermore, Smarsh doesn’t play her childhood for shock value. All of the main characters in her life are viewed with compassion. In fact, the book is more like HILLBILLY ELEGY than GLASS CASTLE; but HILLBILLY wasn’t political at all compared to this. Smarsh puts no blame whatsoever on any of her relatives for their actions; she blames everything on poverty, and poverty she blames on our flawed American system.
She has no policy prescriptions, and it’s not clear what she would advocate to fix things. Her relatives eschew handouts and help, and wouldn’t accept increased (or any) welfare payments if they were offered, so increasing traditional poverty relief programs won’t help. What Smarsh seems to want is an admission – from somewhere, somehow – that the American Dream is a hoax. Working hard DOESN’T help. And then, I guess, we take it from there?
I can see whence she gets this – by all accounts, her folks DID work hard, and DO work hard. I lost track of the number of truck stops opened by the females and jobs held down by her Dad. And I’m not seeing incapacitating addiction, other than by Dad’s new wife, or too many other horrendous life decisions; apart from too much husband-hopping and, of course, the unwanted pregnancies, these being where Smarsh lays the blame from Day 1, being one of them herself. Her family is Catholic, so I guess that’s why contraception is not mentioned even one time throughout the entire book that I can remember. (Smarsh stays unfertilized by choosing a boyfriend with no “physical desire” for her – she drops this strange fact at the end of the book, never having mentioned a boyfriend before, which was bizarre.) It is odd to me how Catholics can apparently take the no-contraception rule so incredibly seriously, but not pay any respect to certain other rules, such as, oh, say, the one about marriage vows.
As a writer, Smarsh occasionally gets repetitive, as well as coming off as whiny. A big plot point is her mother’s ambivalence toward her. She gives us very few actual examples, none of which is earth-shattering; though maybe I’m just inured to such things by the whole GLASS CASTLE genre. The narrative also does not seem directly chronological, and gets confusing. Apart from the names of her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, names of other relatives could get hard to keep straight, especially due to the overlapping ages of the generations due to the unplanned timing of pregnancies; but Smarsh does drop reminders reasonably often (“my young aunt”, etc.).
I wanted to return to this story again and again… maybe, in the end, mostly due to my personal reasons. I’m so happy I discovered it.
A wonderful Kansas and feminist story, firmly grounded in a dawning
The author grew up in Kansas to parents who got divorced when she was fairly young. Her mother was also a child of divorce and in her case her mother got married five times. Eventually Sarah's mother got married to a farmer which provided a stability that the author, her mother and her grandmother had lacked most of their lives. Sarah's father had grown up on a farm but he turned his hand to carpentry and wood working to make ends meet. Both Sarah's mother and father found new partners after their divorce but Sarah didn't really get along with her mother's boyfriend so she lived with her grandmother and her husband until she went away to school. A unique twist to this memoir is that the author tells it to her unborn child. Unborn as in will never be born because Sarah decided that she could not bring another child into poverty. Instead she became a writer and professor. She escaped the trap of poverty that the generations before had been sucked in by. This book tells some hard truths about being in the working poor and for that reason it is an important book.
(Belated note: Barack Obama included this on his favorite 2019 books list, perhaps helped by the common Kansas roots, and that will inevitably increase its profile).
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.
Sarah Smarsh is a talented writer, and her family story is interesting; but the memoir isn't as good as it could have been.
I did find the backstory and story of the author's family and upbringing interesting enough. The personal stories and wondering how she would come out this where she is today kept me reading. But her commentary seemed to interfere with the story and that part of the narrative was not what I enjoyed reading the most - regardless of whether or not I agreed with her train of thought. Still, being from Kansas I can see where some would find this a helpful reflection on the state of life, especially it becomes harder and harder for farmers or blue collar workers to make ends meet. Those interested in commentary more that personal story might enjoy this more.
It's a memoir in the style of "Hillbilly Elegy;" a woman overcomes her difficult and impoverished upbringing in the Plains States to become a successful writer and evolved individual.
It is written as if told to an unborn ( even unconceived) child the author might have had (could have had) as a teen. I initially thought this was an imaginative and interesting angle, but honestly this takes up only a small portion of the book. IMHO she might have developed this angle further, or just left it out entirely.