Bone of the bone Essays on America by a daughter of the working class, 2013-2014

Journalist-author Smarsh (Heartland, 2018) gathers 36 essays--all but one previously published--written over the past ten years. "I am bone of the bone of them that live in trailer homes," she writes, and as in Heartland, she focuses here on "the multi-pronged classism of the United States," and "our broad, unexamined prejudice against those long known, tellingly, as 'white trash.'" Her most compelling essays combine affecting stories from her life with political arguments. In one piece, details about the life of a brother who frequently sells blood plasma to pay his bills bump up against statistics about the money generated by the drug companies that use that plasma. Smarsh defines herself as a populist and a progressive and defends both positions frequently in her essays. In a longer story, she contemplates how she considered running for the Senate from her home state of Kansas but decided against it. The wrenching, final, previously unpublished essay describes the author's fraught relationship with her mother from childhood through her mother's death.

The author of Heartland returns with a collection of pieces that illuminate the plights and humanity of her working-class subjects. "The White, rural, working-poor people about whom I most often write--they are your people too," writes Smarsh in the introduction to this compendium of 36 essays, the majority of which originally appeared in a range of publications. The author possesses a distinct style, one simultaneously personal and political, with the aim of navigating "the space where storytelling might be at once factual in content and artistic in form." In her essays, which range from two to 18 pages, she makes frequent references to her own experiences. "I am bone of the bone of them that live in trailer parks," she writes in a 2014 essay about "the teeth of poor folk," which criticizes America's costly dental care system and humanizes those who are unable to afford treatment. She calls for the American dream "to put its money where its mouth is" with different laws and "individual awareness of the judgments we pass on people." Another essay describes Smarsh's brother, a first-generation college graduate who "had no connections in the professional world, and no one to tell him that communications and history degrees were bad bets to begin with." As she recounts, he regularly sold his plasma over the course of a decade to make ends meet. In a piece about growing wheat in Kansas, the author writes, "The greater divide in America today is not between red and blue but between what is discussed in powerful rooms and what is understood in the field." Even though these essays were shaped by more than a dozen editors, this collection's impact is staggering, and Smarsh's voice is constant, studied, and compassionate. This powerful reckoning with the costs of being poor should be required short-form nonfiction reading. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.