Rise from poverty sparks questions

Sarah Smarsh grew up in rural Kansas in the 1980s, the daughter of a teenage mother and a father who wasn’t much older.

Her parents bounced from house to house until they divorced when Smarsh was a fourth-grader.

She lived for a while with her unhappy mother and then, when her mom remarried, with her grandmother, who had a government job in Wichita and commuted on weekends to stay with her seventh husband on his farm in the country.

Smarsh, now a journalist, reflects on her childhood with a mixture of longing, detached curiosity and anger.

The anger is addressed not toward her parents or other relatives but toward a society deliberately blind to class and economic hardship — a society that made the members of her family blame themselves for their inability to put enough • “Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth” (Scribner, 304 pages, $26) by Sarah Smarsh

money together to create a stable life.

Smarsh asks the question that many others who have been able to claw their way up from one class to a more comfortable one ask: Why was I able to do this when so many generations before me couldn’t?

One of her answers is that she — unlike her mother, grandmother and greatgrandmother — didn’t have a baby when she was a teenager.

“Poverty makes motherhood harder, and motherhood makes poverty harder,” she says.

Her book is addressed not directly to the reader but to the unborn daughter she started imagining when she was a preteen.

Without much guidance from the outside world, she began asking herself during times of confusion, “What would I tell my daughter to do?”

This imaginary daughter, who brought her a sense of clarity and calm, became a guiding force in her life, even though, paradoxically, she realizes that her “most important assignment” is to “make sure you were never born.”

She also credits a father who, despite faults that include alcoholism and drug addiction, paid attention to her and treated her kindly.

And she held onto any words of encouragement she received — from publicschool teachers, who placed her in a program for gifted children, and a grandfather who told her, “You're pretty dang smart.”

This is Smarsh's story but never her story alone. She carefully untangles the threads of her grandmother’s and greatgrandmother’s lives, as they drifted around the country on the run from one abusive boyfriend or husband after another.

While hewing to the details of her life and those of her relatives, she widens her perspective to examine the effects of poverty and class on all of them.

“The Midwestern Catholic ethos that surrounded me as a child defaulted to silence,” she writes. “If your life was a mess, we thought, you brought it on yourself. You got what you had coming to you.”

Brave and heart-wrenching, her book gives a voice to a group of people too easily ignored.