‘Bone of the Bone’: Sarah Smarsh’s new book traces path from rural Kansas to national fame

Sarah Smarsh proudly considers herself a “daughter of the working class.”

In fact, the Kansas-based author is a fifth-generation farm girl whose impoverished mother was a mere 17 when discovering her pregnancy.

But Smarsh never shies away from this seemingly unpromising background.

Instead, her writing embraces that facet through equal parts fierce confessional, sneaky allegory and relentless boots-on-the-ground journalism. Smarsh wields a voice that specifically speaks about herself while somehow simultaneously speaking up for everyone.

“Believe it or not, I don’t walk around thinking about poverty and class issues all day,” says Smarsh, a former Kansas City and Lawrence resident who currently lives in rural Kansas.

“Just like anybody who has a particular focus, we’re more complicated and nuanced beings. What I choose to include in my books is strategic and organized by that principle.”

Her latest book is titled “Bone of the Bone: Essays on America by a Daughter of the Working Class.” It hits shelves Tuesday and is published by Scribner.

It offers three dozen essays that chronicle her 1980s and 90s upbringing in central Kansas, her adult life as a freelance journalist for regional and national publications such as Harper’s, The New York Times and The Huffington Post, through her prospective candidacy for the U.S. Senate.

She appears Sept. 12 at Lawrence’s Liberty Hall and Sept. 16 at KC’s Unity Temple on the Country Club Plaza.

“I didn’t really get to do this so much with my previous book . . . which came out in the peak pandemic, pre-vaccine era. This is my first book tour proper, out on the road, convening in brick-and-mortar spaces with real human beings,” Smarsh said.

“Hopefully, these talks offer an alternative to the horse race — to the red and blue maps and the hat binaries and reductive frameworks that we use to talk about our country. We can instead stop and discuss being human in this moment.”

An opportunity to be heard

In “Bone of the Bone,” Smarsh provides the word “marginalization” to describe the unifying subject matter of the essays. Are there other words that might also exemplify her focus?

“I certainly come back again and again to a largely ignored term in our culture and discourse, which is socioeconomic class. When I talk about marginalization, people, place or identity that my work tries to address, it has everything to do with class … and I would also say geography,” says Smarsh, interviewed over Zoom in August.

Consequently, she inevitably ends up speaking toward the concept of “rurality” so emblematic of Middle America.

“When I first shifted gears to be very intentional in the themes I approach, I underestimated the extent to which the rural aspect of my background in poverty was a feature of it. Both of those themes intersect in ways that relate to marginalization,” she adds.

Her essays range from think pieces about the rise in populism to personal accounts of a summer job toiling as a Hooters Girl. The 44-year-old writer chose the title of her book based on the opening sentence from “Poor Teeth,” a 2014 article that would prove to be her signature contribution: “I am bone of the bone of them that live in trailer homes.”

“Out of all the essays in this book, it’s the one that probably changed my life,” she says. “That was the first essay where I just really went for the jugular: ‘This country doesn’t talk about class, and I’m pissed off about it, and it matters, and here’s why.’ I had so many outlets turn it down. Then, ultimately, a digital magazine (Aeon) based in London that publishes fine work picked it up and, as they say, went viral.”

“Poor Teeth” aims both meticulous research and personal witness at an issue Smarsh sees as related to social justice: access to healthcare, specifically dentistry.

“My family’s in it. I’m in it. There’s some storytelling. There’s some exposition. There’s also a lot of research, statistics and facts. “Poor Teeth” showed me how to use a hybrid model that works for me,” she says.

“The first piece I read of hers was ‘Poor Teeth … and it blew me away,” says Jessica Reed, a senior editor at The Guardian US.

“Like many of us, I have some close members of my family who, for years, have eschewed going to the dentist simply because they can’t afford it. What follows, when you don’t have a presentable smile, is a legacy of shame. Because to have bad teeth is so frowned upon, right? She put words into something a lot of us have seen but rarely talk about.”

Reed is also the first person Smarsh thanks in the acknowledgments of her new book.

The author considers Reed the editor who gave her “an opportunity to be heard.”

“(Sarah’s) writing is both muscular — she writes with such conviction — and anchored in place,” Reed says.

“It’s a rare sight in a media landscape populated by people who most come from or live in big coastal cities. I don’t know about you, but reading about the lives of New Yorkers gets a bit repetitive at times. Reading someone writing about the state of the grasslands — what is directly outside her window — is such a breath of fresh air.”

Embracing her home state

With Smarsh’s material so deeply, uncompromisingly rooted in Kansas, one might assume she encounters some pushback from the coastal elites. Surprisingly, that hasn’t been the case.

“I’ve never had somebody say, ‘You really need to zoom out more and drop these uber-specific Kansas references.’ There’s a way in which a paradox is at work in writing, where heightened specificity sometimes is the door into a sense of universal connection,” she says.

“But I sometimes wonder if people are feeling like this is a shtick at this point. It really is who I am, and I find myself needing to repeat it to get my point across.”

Smarsh earned undergraduate degrees in journalism and English at the University of Kansas. While living in Lawrence, she freelanced for Lawrence.com and wrote for the student paper, which led to a story about low-income students who fell through the loopholes in their FAFSA applications getting picked up by the Associated Press.

She soon made her way to New York to pursue an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University, where she found work ranging from freelancing for airline magazines to crafting grant proposals. She eventually headed back to Kansas to take a full-time staff job at the Pitch. More recently, she landed a fellowship at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government before deciding that her own writing was more important than a comfy career in academia.

“Decades prior, I probably would have happily been filing for a newspaper or newsroom for many years. While I was an ambitious young person — and I did the thing of moving to New York — I was never somebody who wanted to ‘get out of Kansas,’” she admits.

But her career itself went viral once “Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth” got published in 2018. “Heartland” became a finalist for the National Book Award for nonfiction and a recipient of the Kansas Notable Book Award.

“My book had the stamp of memoir on it,” Smarsh says. “But it’s more complicated than that in genre terms. There was a lot of research, reporting and interviews that went into an effort to use a family experience as a kind of springboard to a much bigger issue involving culture and policy concerns that are national.”

That aspect caught the attention of the Democratic Party in 2019.

Senator Smarsh?

She got invited to meet with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to discuss running for the state’s open U.S. Senate seat in 2020. For a stretch, author Sarah Smarsh looked poised to become Senator Sarah Smarsh.

This will-she-or-won’t-she ordeal gets addressed in a chapter of her book titled “In the Running.”

“Basically, that call came from without, not from within -- by which I mean people, readers and some very powerful folks were encouraging me in that direction,” she recalls.

Since Pat Roberts was vacating his long-held Senate seat, the idea was that maybe a charismatic, salt-of-the-earth candidate like Smarsh could flip it.

“I’m not a political person. I would not nominate myself as someone who would arrive in that environment and have the precise skillset one draws upon to survive in it. Another way of saying that is I’m a straight shooter. I don’t tend to care what anybody thinks, and I doubt that particular bent would have any longevity in terms of political success,” she says.

Yet … ultimately, that wasn’t why she chose not to run.

“While I might share some of the concerns that these public servants, elected officials and political candidates have, as a writer and journalist I’m already speaking to those same things, but by way of a skillset that feels more authentic to myself,” she says. “And going back to that lone wolf thing, I don’t like feeling beholden to any organization, and certainly not any political party. That’s the independent Kansan in me.”

After Smarsh made her decision, she received a note from Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren.

It read, “There are many ways to serve.”

Jon Niccum is a filmmaker, freelance writer and author. His new book is titled “Power Up: Leadership, Character and Conflict Beyond the Superhero Multiverse.”