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Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth
Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth
Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth
Audiobook9 hours

Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

Written by Sarah Smarsh

Narrated by Sarah Smarsh

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

()

About this audiobook

*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 works—including Matthew Desmond’s Evicted and Amy Goldstein’s Janesville—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).
LanguageEnglish
Release dateSep 18, 2018
ISBN9781508265313
Author

Sarah Smarsh

Sarah Smarsh is a journalist who has reported for The New York Times, Harper’s, the Guardian, and many other publications. Her first book, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her second book, She Come by It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Smarsh is a frequent political commentator and speaker on socioeconomic class. She lives in Kansas.

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Reviews for Heartland

Rating: 4.02830190264151 out of 5 stars
4/5

265 ratings35 reviews

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Beautiful book with an eye-opening story of poverty in America. The story is engaging from the start and the narration is great. 10/10 recommend.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The truth- made this book great. I would love for my daughters to read this. I will pass this one along.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Admittedly, I am biased as I can identify w the author in a profound way. Right down to our Grandma Betty. Having grown up in rural Missouri just a few hours from Sarah Smarsh’s hometown and being born 30 days after her, I could relate to almost every facet of her childhood.

    Beyond the personal connection I had to his book, it is a thought provoking look at class structure and how ‘working hard’ doesn’t always equate to getting ahead. Really, really well done.
    A must read during this election year.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A wonderful insight into poverty. Thank you for sharing your experience. Congratulations for breaking the chain.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I can’t finish this because it makes me cringe listening to her heavy pushing the “I grew up in poverty,” narrative. Though she may have been poor, what makes me cringe is how well she and her family had it compared to the people in my community. She describes many things that’s afforded to her and her family that extended their bootstraps, from ability to purchase land, dig a pond, stick it with fish, have a savings , etc. I feel her pain but as I listen and consider the poverty that I grew up in, I can’t help but think “cry me a river.” I would’ve loved to switch shoes
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I reject her premise on the housing meltdown. Banks did not want to loan money to people who did not meet traditional standards for obtaining one. They were forced to by Democratic legislation and threatened with legal action if loans were not made. Then those loans they were forced to make were called predatory.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Excellent story with a great message! I really enjoyed listening to this book!
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I think this book needed a stronger editor. The narrative quirk of addressing her words to her never-born child is clunky and distracting. I also find the economic and political analysis to be simplistic and unconvincing. I appreciated hearing Smarsh's personal story, but the weaknesses of the book outweigh the strengths.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The narrative alone is would make this worth reading, but it’s the intelligent commentary on the construct of class in America that makes this book truly great.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Beautifully warm, aware and inspiring throughout its rough and real edges.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I loved it. Could have been written by me. A Canadian.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I listened to this book while doing my 30-minute walk on the treadmill. Although I enjoyed it, especially because of the superb writing, I did find the continuity and the multi-generational names a bit hard to follow at times. I also thought the use of the character August was a bit gimmicky until I heard Smarsh’s ending where the character proved to be very effective and touching. “Heartland” is a beautiful story, often hard to read (in my case listen to), but whose message is important, especially in these years of recovery from Trump.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Powerful and affecting memoir of growing up poor in rural Kansas. I wish the editing had been better, some of it seemed awkward.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The author describes her struggles growing up (mostly) on a farm outside of Wichita. Like many lower income families, she did move around quite a bit, but the farmhouse that her grandmother lived in was home base. Her family was always just barely making it, and she reflects on how they interacted with society and how various government policies contributed to their situation. She reflects on how her family supposedly had a lot of advantages but various factors can keep even white skinned people from "making it". 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.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I feel slightly traitorous because this got such good reviews. I wish I could put it down to just not clicking, but this book came short of working for me. At times, when she just lets herself talk about her family, especially the women in it, Heartland soars. The problem is when it doesn't. She's used an awkward framing device--writing the book as a letter to the child she didn't and will never have. The big problem is that she wants her book to be more than a memoir, but an insight into the type of rural poverty she came from. She's too conscious of it, and as a result, too often she tells rather than shows. Rather than letting the narrative teach the lesson, she jumps in to explain it or to teach a mini-lesson--not just background history such as the farm crisis of the 1980s, but explanations of specific events.

    Sarah Smarsh is a talented writer, and her family story is interesting; but the memoir isn't as good as it could have been.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Maybe a 2.75. This is a serious, thoughtful, clear-eyed and intimate look at people who have been largely forgotten, ignored, misunderstood and misled: poor, rural whites in a "flyover" state. These are Smarsh's family, their lives and communities, where she grew up in south central Kansas. I've spent a lot of time in that part of the country: I've driven US 54 many times, camped and hiked at the Kingman state fishing lake, visited graves outside Admire, had a couple of short stories published set in this region. I recognize Smarsh's grandfather Arnie in our neighbor who stomps up the drive in shit-smeared sneakers and sweat-stained hat, who has reset our windmill pump and runs a few cows on our little acreage to keep the weeds down for us. But, Lord, what a hard life it can be. Especially for the women. Teenaged moms are almost the norm, though girls may be warned "You don't want to get tied down, you know what I mean?" Everyone works multiple jobs: farming and construction, waitressing and weighing wheat at the grain elevator, babysitting and cosmetic sales. These people *work*. And may be only a truck breakdown away from insolvency. They move. All the time. Marriages, divorces, abuse, lost jobs; the grandparents, aunts, uncles, in-laws, kids... they pack up and relocate into and out of each other's houses as they can or must. They are pretty much all addicted to something: alcohol, cigarettes, pills; depression and mental instability abound. Smarsh's indomitable grandmother Betty's mother once refuses her a loan of $75 to escape a brutally abusive husband, saying "You made your bed, now you lay on it." Betty decides then and there that if anyone ever asks her for help, she will give it. And she does. Smarsh also writes movingly of her gentle, atypically tender father: he was the one who brushed her hair for her before school, who left little poems for her, who ends up severely depressed and victim of a gambling problem, loyal to a second wife with a devastating pill habit. Smarsh decides early on that as much as she loves all these people and the Kansas prairie and the smell of the farm on a November night, she will not stay. And she doesn't. But this book is much less about her own struggles and wayfinding as it is a heartfelt look at these people and this life, and how circumscribed their options are. She notes somewhat bitterly that when she manages to get a scholarship to the University of Kansas intended for low-income, minority, first-generation students, the few other white students joke that they are the "white trash" recipients.

    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.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I listened to this book while doing my 30-minute walk on the treadmill. Although I enjoyed it, especially because of the superb writing, I did find the continuity and the multi-generational names a bit hard to follow at times. I also thought the use of the character August was a bit gimmicky until I heard Smarsh’s ending where the character proved to be very effective and touching. “Heartland” is a beautiful story, often hard to read (in my case listen to), but whose message is important, especially in these years of recovery from Trump.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    For anyone seeking to under the current political environment, this book is essential reading.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This might be categorized as the lesser known "Educated," but it is pretty different. The author comes from a poor Kansas family, and there is much focus on the women of the family. Aside from a standard memoir, she focuses on what family traditions she does and doesn't choose to keep, and where she does and doesn't have a choice because ... not everyone in our country gets choices. The style of narrating to a future child kept the perspective unique for me. (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).
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Okay, I know it's right there in the title, but somehow I thought this was going to be more of a socio-political exploration of the lives of the working class, less a bunch of stories. Putting that aside, I'm not convinced that Heartland completely works as a memoir. The author jumps around, leaves portions of her story untold or keeps the details shrouded. These omissions distanced me. It's fine for an author to exclude any details from their work that they wish to exclude, but doing so may require some patchwork.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.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I could relate to much of this story and think that its a book worth reading. Not all of rural America is hooked on drugs, there is a huge amount of people trapped in the lifestyle of poverty- by their heritage and circumstances.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Heartland is Sarah Smarsh’s memoir of growing up in rural Kansas. Smarsh addresses her memoir to her unborn child. A child she was never pregnant with because she saw what her mother and other women in her family went through as teenage mothers and vowed that would never be her. Which is great but as a literary device it was a little weird and awkward. Thankfully, she doesn’t speak to her imaginary child too terribly often.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.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The most beautifully written memoir I've read about childhood poverty since Frank McCourt's earlier works. I lived in rural Kansas for a good chunk of my childhood and she captures the spirit and the challenges of that unique, often overlooked, place very well. Recommended reading for everyone, especially those involved in family law, education, income parity, banking, and domestic policy.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Very few memoirs illicit much interest from me. They are usually ego enhancers for the author and full of bias. This one definitely has a point of view but it is well earned objectively based on the author's experiences growing up poor in rural Kansas. Virtually all the young women in her experience end up pregnant as teens and end up at the mercy of unkind men. At many times she speaks to the baby girl she never had. This is a powerful memoir that makes me have more respect for those without means.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Every person who believes that hard work alone will solve the poverty issue need to read this book. Living in rural Kansas the authors tells her story of what it is like to grow up poor and never catch up with expenses. The saying “It takes money to make money” is true. If you have only bills, you never make money. Excellent non-fiction book selection for a book club.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Nothing really wrong with the book, but I just couldn't get into it. It is a memoir of growing up in Kansas in a divorced and impoverish farm-oriented family. I'm in a "reading funk" at the moment so I might enjoy it some other time. Abandoned.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Initially I really liked listening to this book which is narrated by the author. As the book wore on, though, I found that it skipped around so much that I was confused about what happened in which order. It might have been easier to follow this book in print but you would still have to pay attention about who was living where and with whom.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.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    -- By middle of HEARTLAND I like Smarsh. Majority of people accept life they're dealt. Before age 40 Smarsh had written this well-researched memoir. She overcame an impoverished childhood spent living with relatives in rural Kansas as well as more urban areas. --
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I can’t be objective about this book. It’s a memoir by someone born unwanted to an unwed teenage mother, who grew up in & around Wichita. I was born to an unwed teenage mother, and I spent a year or so in my late teens with the weirdest determination to move with my boyfriend from Staten Island to Wichita. Hence this book was like a weird mash-up of the kind of life I could have had, poor and disadvantaged, had I not been relinquished; and the life I briefly but badly wanted to have, canning vegetables in a farmhouse in Kansas.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.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Oh my. Had heard of, read on plane back from Kansas on recommendation of Nancy Z - so good! Had I taken a non-fiction writing course instead of fiction at the Lawrence Arts Center way back when Smarsh would have been my instructor.A wonderful Kansas and feminist story, firmly grounded in a dawning class awareness here in 2019.