Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth
(Scribner, $26) Sarah Smarsh learned early just how unforgiving the world can be, said Mary Kay Linge in the New York Post. In one potent scene in her “soul-baring” meditation on poverty and class in America, Smarsh, at age 4, visits a litter of kittens on her family’s struggling Kansas wheat farm, and when she reaches out to pet one of the babies, its head rolls away from its body. Apparently, a fox or possum had gnawed through the kitten’s neck while the mother cat was out hunting. Smarsh herself was often left without parental protection: Her father was away for weeks at a time working construction jobs to keep the family afloat; her mother was caring for a new baby and suffering postpartum depression. Heartland, which reads like a woman’s answer to J.D. Vance’s best-selling Hillbilly Elegy, is “a loving yet unflinching look at the people who grow America’s food and build its houses but never seem to fully share in its prosperity.”
Smarsh sets her “bleak yet compelling” portrait of one poor white family in a broader context, said Stephanie Hanes in CSMonitor.com. She shows how her family’s struggles in the 1980s and beyond can be mapped against the rise of agribusiness and the demise of the family farm, the dismantling of public health care, and the defunding of public schools. More powerful than her sociological arguments, though, are her vivid character sketches. We get to know her emotionally scarred mother; a grandma with a big heart and a large collection of ex-husbands; and her quiet father, whose skill at woodworking did him little good during the Great Recession. “The complexity of these characters seems the central point of Heartland.” The book reminds us that it’s too easy to stereotype the rural poor. “The reality is much more nuanced, and all the more heartbreaking.”
Now a journalist and professor, Smarsh claims she escaped poverty because—unlike her mom, grandma, and great-grandma— she didn’t become a teenage mother, said Francesca Mari in The New York Times. It can thus be confusing when Smarsh, now 38, interrupts her story to address the baby she never had. But by regularly asking herself, “What would I tell my daughter?” the author has been able to find a better life path and “take advantage of the can-do attitude that is her inheritance.” Asking the question is “an effective life hack, immediately summoning one’s purest aspirations.” And unlike the American Dream, which has failed her family, “it isn’t premised on abstract hope. It cuts the crap.”