Writing from both sides of the economic divide

When she was a child, Sarah Smarsh’s dad started foaming at the mouth in the emergency room. To make ends meet, he had taken a second job transporting industrial chemicals in a truck that, it turns out, was leaking toxic fumes. His experience, among others her family endured as rural, working-­class Americans, highlights the plight of those whose welfare has too often been compromised or overlooked. “We were starved for someone to even feign to care about us,” she writes in Bone of the Bone.

For those still grappling with the 2024 presidential election and the anxieties of many working-class Americans, let this collection of essays be a guide. Following Heartland, Smarsh’s 2018 best-selling memoir, Bone of the Bone is a collection of 35 previously published essays written since 2013, along with one new one. The book can be seen as a commentary on the inequities faced by the working class during the rise and continuation of the MAGA movement—and an explanation for how certain messages resonated with a demographic that felt abandoned, unseen, and unheard.

That said, the book’s scope is larger than the current political landscape, as Smarsh’s chronology reaches backward generationally and, at times, forward in her imagination. Combining nuanced political reporting with her family’s anecdotal evidence of impoverishment in rural Kansas, she clarifies the often insurmountable odds that working-class Americans face in their attempt to move forward or just survive. Now also a member of the more elite “educated class” and a self-described progressive, Smarsh writes from both sides of the economic divide. Her essays compound to address one of our nation’s “foundational myths—that we are a democracy without castes.”