The book I’m reading now...
Several years ago, I believe it was the fall of 2019 b.c. (before covid), one of the keynote speakers at the Kansas Housing annual conference was an author by the name of Sarah Smarsh. She is a journalist who was published in newspaper columns and magazines, but her greatest success came from the first and only book she had written: “Heartland — A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth.” Almost an overnight sensation, Sarah’s book soared almost instantly as a New York Times bestseller.
As Sarah shared some of her life stories in her noon luncheon speech, I knew immediately I would be buying a copy of her book. Sarah, a lifelong Kansas resident, grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, as the country’s wealth gap widened—with Sarah’s family of laborers on the losing end. Through her intergenerational story, she challenges her readers to examine the class divide in our country and the myths about people thought to BE less because they EARN less.
I have been intrigued by Sarah’s book because of the era—1980s and 1990s—that I know so well. And even though I am 26 years older than Sarah, I still catch a lot of similarities in growing up because this was when I was parenting two boys. It’s also interesting because it is a true account of life in (mostly) central Kansas, talking about places I remember and can still recognize.
Sarah writes to the daughter she never had. She says even though she had never been pregnant, she became a mother very young—to herself, her little brother, and even to her own young mother. She tells the unborn daughter about the hard economies of a family, a town, a region, a country, a world that shaped her relationship to creation—and, yes, to her womb, and also what she would or wouldn’t have a chance to make of herself. Her memoir spans four generations of her family, putting a very human face on the issue of economic inequality. The following segment from the book touched me deeply.
“Like my mother, I came to know first hand the relationship between place of residence and place of schooling. Attending eight schools by ninth grade taught me that, if you can hold to your center without going crazy, you’re the same person wherever you go, even as the scenery changes. That scenery is shaped, in part, by money and class.
“If you live in a house that needs shingles, you will attend a school that needs books, and while sitting in that school’s desk you’ll struggle to focus because your tooth needs a dentist or your stomach needs food. Teachers, for such children, become mothers; schools become houses; and cafeterias become hearths. It can be brutal, then to exit a school for what an adult has informed you will be the last time, when that school has been the steadiest place you’ve ever known.”(p. 194195) Many reviews from across the country are included, and one that seemed to nail it the best is from The Hutchinson News: “In her memoir, journalist Sarah Smarsh offers a stark and timely look at the lives of the working poor.....Smarsh holds the deeply personal stories from her life growing up in rural Kingman County against the lens of Reaganomics. She maps her family’s lives alongside the demise of the family farm, defunded schools, and stagnant wages of the 1980s and 1990s.”
If you are interested in reading this book, I will share it upon request. I just don’t want to lose it!
