Many years ago, I read Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed and it knocked my socks off. When I saw Sarah Smarsh’s Heartland had been favorably compared to it and recommended to people who liked it, I jumped at the opportunity (provided by Scribner and NetGalley) to read it in exchange for my honest review.
First of all, thanks a LOT, Sarah! I was awake most of the night reading, then thinking about this book! Like The Glass Castle, so many things in it resonated strongly with me while it both entertained me and made me THINK. (My favorite kind of book)
Sarah had a chaotic childhood in Kansas in the 1980s and 1990s, when the changing economic policies in the U.S. solidified the her family’s position as part of “the working poor.” The ginormous issue here is the class divide in the U.S., and Smarsh lays out the horrors in (as the subtitle says) “A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth.”
Sarah’s family “consisted mostly of single moms and their daughters.” For generations, teenage girls in the family have given birth and then endured mostly horrific marriages/relationships: “Every woman who helped raise me, on my mom’s side of the family, had been a teenage mother who brought a baby into a dangerous place.” For Sarah, that meant being keenly aware that something was wrong: “The defining feeling of my childhood was that of being told there wasn’t a problem when I knew damn well there was.
Her determination to get out, to break the cycle, is clear: she relates that she “looked at my family then and felt I had two choices: be a relentless worker with a chance at building her own financial foundation or live the carefree way…” which reminded me so much of my own thought processes many years ago. She prepared to go to college, and during the application process the “…specifics were unclear and fell to me to organize and decide, as is usually the case for a college-hopeful teenager whose family never went.”
On an individual level, her story (like that of Jeannette Walls in The Glass Castle) is inspiring. But it’s so damn depressing to realize that so many people are trapped in a cycle of poverty. Even worse, as she did research in her graduate studies, she “…found that…if you are poor, you are likely to stay poor, no matter how hard you work.” A kneejerk response might be, “well, she worked her way out, so anyone can.” But reading the reality for poor people, especially women, provides insight as to why this just isn’t so.
Much of the story is told to the daughter she might have had if she had followed the family pattern of teen pregnancy. It was slightly confusing at first, until I stopped thinking so much about my own history and focused on what she was saying.
The book is pretty stunning, and I am eager to bring it to one of my book clubs, to see if it is as deeply affecting to women who grew up without knowing what it’s like to grow up poor is as it was for me. Five stars.