Kansas native Sarah Smarsh has long been an outspoken advocate for the white, rural working class.
In 2018, Heartland, her memoir about growing up impoverished and disenfranchised on a fifth-generation wheat farm 30 miles west of Wichita, was a finalist for the National Book Award, a New York Times bestseller, and among the “best books” according to NPR and a slew of other national publications.
But Smarsh — a self-proclaimed “ink-stained hustler” and the first in her family to graduate from college — has been writing shrewd, politically charged commentary about “the multipronged classism of these United States” for decades. And like many hardworking journalists, prior to the notoriety that came with the success of her memoir, she often did so for little to no compensation.
Now, for the first time, much of Smarsh’s previously published short-form work is available in one searing — and stunning — collection. In 36 essays ranging from two to 18 pages, covering topics as far-reaching as the impact of paltry dental care access in rural America to why it’s crucial that we foster open dialogue with others who have opposing political views, Bone of the Bone: Essays on America by a Daughter of the Working Class gives the often-ignored people in what some call “flyover country” their due.
As is to be expected from a portfolio of work arranged chronologically, the book takes a bit to ramp up to a boil. Some of Smarsh’s early work highlights her newbie status as a low-rung reporter and showcases the types of issues Smarsh was most interested in before she found her strength as a writer. There’s the first mostly biographical essay from 2013 titled “How I Moved Twenty-One Times Before College,” for example, or a heavily researched but meandering 2014 piece for Guernica called “Freedom Mandate,” which discusses what happens when the religious right influences the revamping of civics curricula in K-12 public education.
In some of the slightly sturdier pieces, including “The New Migrants” and “Blood Brother,” Smarsh uses family lore — her father’s hardscrabble, itinerant career as a construction worker following the 2008 financial crisis or her brother’s decadelong habit of donating plasma in exchange for cash to pay his bills, for example — to illustrate a larger truth: that people in the heartlands work just as hard as people in Silicon Valley, and they deserve some respect.
credit: Doug Stremel
But though Smarsh’s personal experiences are the glue that keep these pieces together, they are not what ultimately drives the collection forward. Here, we must look to her anger — the constant drumbeat of frustration over what she calls the “elite” and “ratings-fixated” media’s persistent dismissal of rural whites as either “dangerous idiots,” “right-wing White guys wearing tool belts,” or folks “tucked away in a remote mountain shanty like a coal-dusted ghost, as though White poverty isn’t always right in front of us, swiping credit cards at a discount store in Denver or asking for cash on a Los Angeles sidewalk.” This intersection of personal and political is where Smarsh’s powers of observation and will to incite change thrive.
Nowhere is this as clear as in her essays for the New York Times, the Guardian and other publications, from 2018 onward. In “Liberal Blind Spots are Hiding the Truth” she insists that the people she grew up with wish not for “a return to times that were worse for women and people of color but progress toward a society in which everyone can get by.”
In “Dispel the Disbelief” she blames some rural and/or poor Americans’ obsession with Fox News and pro-Trump rhetoric not on lack of intelligence but on media illiteracy: “Many Americans today have a glut of information but poor media literacy — hard to rectify if you work on your feet all day, don’t own a computer, and didn’t get a chance to learn the vocabulary of national discourse.”
And in “How Is Arguing with Trump Voters Working Out for You?” she doubles down on the need for both sides of the political divide to be more open-minded instead of our fallback, dismissive. She writes, “You can be intellectually woke without being awakened to the largest truth: that we are all connected, enemies and allies alike.”
While you may not agree with or be able to relate to everything Smarsh has to say in “Bone of the Bone,” it’s a collection that offers a multitude of gifts on a variety of heavy-hitting levels.
After all, Smarsh reminds us, “we are a nation of essentially similar people shaped by vastly different circumstances of place, wealth, education, and culture.” What we need to do, for once, is stop judging each other or jumping to erroneous conclusions — and just listen.
Bone of the Bone
By Sarah Smarsh
(Scribner; 352 pages; $29.99)
Originally ran in the San Francisco Chronicle (September 12, 2024)
Alexis Burling 