Best Of Sarah Smarsh's "Heartland"

Here is a selection of memorable quotes from Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth by Sarah Smarsh

But the American Dream has a price tag on it. The cost changes depending on where you're born and to whom, with what colour skin and with how much money in your parents' bank account.

The poorer you are, the higher the price. You can pay an entire life in labor, it turns out, and have nothing to show for it. Less than nothing, even: debt, injury, abject need. 

Most of us, regardless of economic station, sacrifice a great deal to it.

p. 42

That can be a satisfying agreement. Grandpa Arnie loved working the land not for the price of wheat per bushel but because smelling damp earth at sunrise felt like a holy experience. Dad loved building something beautiful out of good lumber not for the paycheck but for seeing his own creativity turned into a sturdy, useful structure. The pleasure that Mom got when she sold a little house in Wichita wasn't just for the small commission but for the tears in the family's eyes when she handed them the keys. Work can be a true communion with resources, materials, other people. I have no issue with work.

(page unknown)

In every place, something is gained and something is lost. Out in the country, at the end of Teresa's life and the beginning of mine, I felt both the treasures of isolation for a strange girl and all the things an independent, thinking woman stood to lose.

p. 91

In the United States, the shaming of the poor is a unique form of bigotry in that it's not necessarily about who or what you are— your skin colour, the gender you're attracted to, having a womb.Rather, it's about what your actions have failed to accomplish— financial success within capitalism—and the related implications about your worth in a supposed meritocracy.

p. 126

To be made invisible as a class is an invalidation. With invalidation comes shame. A shame that deep-being poor in a place full of narratives about middle and upper classes can make you feel like what you are is a failure 

p. 127

My family didn't have its act together, of course, but then plenty of middle- and upper-class families didn't either. The difference was that we stood to pay more for our errors than did wealthier Americans who made the same mistakes.

p. 129

If you work every day and still can't afford what you need, is it worse to steal a little from a big store owned by billionaires than to be a billionaire who underpays his employees? Is it worse to do business under the table with a couple hundred bucks than to keep millions of dollars in an offshore bank? Is a poor alcoholic worse than a rich one? Is a poor gambler worse than a rich one? Is a poor teenager who gets knocked up more irresponsible than a rich one?

p. 129-130

America has an idea that people in poverty make sketchy decisions, but everyone does. The poor just have less room for their errors, which will be laid bare in public for need of help. The teenager's child will eat free school lunch on the taxpayer's dime; the drunk will beg on a sidewalk; the gambler will quickly go into debt and need bailed out.

p. 130

In our obsession with home as a material thing, we forget that primal needs can be met even as the human spirit is hurt. Belonging is, on a psychological level, a primal need, too. It is often denied to the poor.

p. 195

Class and its implications for literacy and access decide what feminism looks like in action. For those of us who would have been holding rifles at the mine entrance rather than lobbying lawmakers in Topeka, one result of that legacy was that we were often the "breadwinners" of our households well before middle-class women flooded the workforce in the 1960s, '70s, '80s. There was in our family, therefore, no semblance of the notion that a woman should or might be "taken care of." There never had been, back to my great-great-grandmother Irene on the Boeing factory line and beyond. For the women I knew, work wasn't a liberation from the home or a revelation of self. It was a way of life—familiar, essential, and unsung for generations.

p. 212

Dorothy, Betty, Pud, Polly, Jeannie—the psychological weight of their lives forced them into profound awareness. It was a way of experiencing the world that higher education has a way of erasing on campuses founded by men who exalted logic and intellect as the only path to knowledge. They had a confidence in their own intuition, a sort of knowing deeper than schooling can render and higher than the dogma of a church. If they could bear the pain of experiencing their world long enough, without numbing themselves, they had what you might call "powers."

p. 245