Bone of the Bone: Essays on America by a Daughter of the Working Class by Sarah Smarsh

After the 2024 Democratic Presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, named Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate, Sarah Smarsh wrote an op ed for The New York Times titled, “Democrats Have Needed Someone Like Tim Walz for Decades.” Walz, she wrote, “embodies the earnest, humane, rural people who shaped me and the prairie populism that shaped the progressive foundations of the Great Plains.”

Smarsh’s August 9, 2024, essay on Walz easily could have found a home in Bone of the Bone, her new collection of journalism and other non-fiction writings (2013-24). These pieces extend the narrative of Smarsh’s 2018 memoir, Heartland, a survey of her Kansas-born life into poverty, the generations who preceded her, and a finalist for the National Book Award. If the writing of her life has a key message, it might be that – surprise! – not everyone from so-called Trump Country is a Trumpist and stereotypes about the rural poor are bullshit.

These points are drilled deep again and again, and again and again, in Bone of the Bone. Since this is a collection of stand-alone pieces, each piece needed to be contextualized upon its original publication. This contextualization is repeated ad nauseum throughout the collection, dulling the reader’s experience. We get it, okay. It’s not made more persuasive through repetition. Nor does it need to be. Because to be clear: her case is powerful, clear, necessary, and oddly unique.

To be clear: her case is powerful, clear, necessary, and oddly unique.

Why oddly? Because telling truths is the role of journalism, and the simpler the truth, the easier it ought to be to tell. Except, Smarsh is right, it’s not. In one 2022 piece, Smarsh writes of “the dangers of using pat binaries – urban and rural, red and blue, coastal and middle – to predict the politics of entire groups, states, or regions. Such crude frameworks render invisible millions of Americans, I’d argue, and often become self-fulfilling prophecies.”

It’s not that Smarsh was always enlightened, but then she achieved her life’s first ambition: not to be a teenage mother, like her own mother and her mother’s mother before that. Then she went to university. “I began to see through the many false narratives of supremacy that govern our society. That men are better than women. That white people are better than everyone else. That the rich are better than the poor. Even, yes, that human beings are better than animals.”

If I had to pick a favourite piece here it would be “In the Running” (Harper’s, 2022), Smarsh’s reconstruction of the months when she was recruited by the Democrats to run for the U.S. Senate. For months, she considered the option, ultimately turning it down, concluding she was a writer, not a politician. This piece proves the case. It is sharp, insightful, colourfully anecdotal, and shocking. Her brief portrait of U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer is penetrating and disappointing. Chuck, WTF?

A review of Bone of the Bone in a Canadian publication ought to beg the question, is there a Canadian Smarsh? I could not think of one. Even in an era when politicians across the spectrum are clamoring to champion what they call “cost of living” issues, it remains the case that those who position class as the dominant determinant of social status are rare. May Smarsh inspire future scribes to the cause.

Sarah Smarsh is a journalist who has reported for The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, 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.

Publisher: Simon & Schuster (September 10, 2024)
Hardcover 8″ x 6″ | 352 pages
ISBN: 9781668055601

Michael Bryson

Michael Bryson has been reviewing books since the 1990s in publications such as The Kitchener-Waterloo Record, Paragraph Magazine, Id Magazine, and Quill & Quire. His short story collections include Thirteen Shades of Black and White (1999) and The Lizard and Other Stories (2009). His fiction has appeared in Best Canadian Stories and other anthologies. His story Survival is available as a Kindle single. From 1999-2018, he oversaw 78 issues of fiction, poetry, reviews, author interviews, essays, and other features at The Danforth Review. He lives in Scarborough, Ontario, and blogs at Art/Life: Scribblings.