Sarah Smarsh

A big part of our problem in America is not about what we know and with what we are familiar; it’s how disconnected we are from the lived experience and reality of others. The only way to counteract this is to be willing to listen and truly hear from the experiences of others.

Sarah Smarsh has exposed and expressed herself and her family, the experience of living as poor, working-class men, women, and children in Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth.

The author writes as to an unborn daughter she often considered and thought about regarding what she would have experienced if born in a predicament similar to the author’s. The author is born in Kansas toward the end of the time of the “family farm” to people who worked the land for generations but whose children were now turning to find work in cities. Her life is constantly in and out of the Wichita urban and rural areas. She chronicled three generations of her family’s life: often the story of men who work hard but often do not have enough, and generally are abusive; the women who endure it for a time, can often find freedom from the abuse, but still constrained by poverty and thus who often find themselves back with abusive men or with family. Constant movement and a lack of settlement; constantly changing schools. The author threw herself into her academic studies and was able to overcome generational cycles by graduating high school without having a child; she went on to college and well beyond and “made it” into the American middle class.

But she does not spend her time judging her origins; she describes them all, and especially their pathologies, as the result of being poor. Their poverty was a choice - not theirs personally, but the choice of everyone else who prospered thanks to their efforts. As the author well attested, it was not as if she or her family members did not “work hard”: quite the contrary. But they were part of that “forgotten” world in the heartland, flyover country, the areas many in more comfortable surroundings look down upon with derision. It was always easier to blame her folk somehow as opposed to seeing the tragedy of how people in her family could work as hard as they did in the “land of opportunity,” the richest country on earth, but only to barely eke out a living.

I cannot personally relate to the author’s experience because I am at least one generation removed from it. Nevertheless, I have known the kind of people who populate the author’s life and story, and the story truly did resonate.

Sure, people in poverty often make less than wise decisions. But everyone does; the difference is how many of us who have the benefits and privilege which attend to some level of generational wealth find ourselves with resources and support systems which cushion those blows, and many who are in poverty do not share in that same privilege. But by the grace of God there would go most of us.

What we find awkward and uncomfortable remains what stares at us in the face in works like these: there are a lot of people who are working very hard in America - far harder than most of us - and the system has been designed to work to their continual disadvantage so they will never really get ahead. And the rest of us, directly or indirectly, benefit and profit from it.

We can, and should, do far better regarding the working poor. It need not be patronizing. But a stronger support system could mean the world for the incipient Sarah Smarshes of our country. And our nation would be a better place for it.… (more)

Finally, a memoir by someone who escaped moral and material poverty in the U.S.A. and who openly points at the elephant in the room: one lucky, focused, intellectually gifted child who makes it does not justify the puritan mentality that relegates the poor in a corner in the name of self-improvement. You can be a hard worker, with values and all, and still be condemned to a lifetime of shame, poverty and possibly substance addiction. Even if you are white!!! This is the most important legacy of the memoir: it is never (only) a matter of skin colour, religion, good will. IT IS A MATTER OF CLASSISM.
Here, I wrote it. No, SHE wrote it. And if you think that she cannot talk because she is white, read this other one
[b:There Will Be No Miracles Here: A Memoir|38650651|There Will Be No Miracles Here A Memoir|Casey Gerald|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1526399296l/38650651._SY75_.jpg|60261760]
He writes pretty much the same thing, but he is black.
… (more)

Finally, a memoir by someone who escaped moral and material poverty in the U.S.A. and who openly points at the elephant in the room: one lucky, focused, intellectually gifted child who makes it does not justify the puritan mentality that relegates the poor in a corner in the name of self-improvement. You can be a hard worker, with values and all, and still be condemned to a lifetime of shame, poverty and possibly substance addiction. Even if you are white!!! This is the most important legacy of the memoir: it is never (only) a matter of skin colour, religion, good will. IT IS A MATTER OF CLASSISM.
Here, I wrote it. No, SHE wrote it. And if you think that she cannot talk because she is white, read this other one
[b:There Will Be No Miracles Here: A Memoir|38650651|There Will Be No Miracles Here A Memoir|Casey Gerald|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1526399296l/38650651._SY75_.jpg|60261760]
He writes pretty much the same thing, but he is black.
… (more)