Sarah Smarsh’s strongest work to date is in Bone of the Bone: Essays on America by a Daughter of the Working Class. Her first book, Heartland, was a sensation; her second, She Come By It Naturally, fell flat for me. Smarsh’s strengths are well suited to the type of short essays in Bone of the Bone.
In 2019, I attended an event in Iowa City where Smarsh was interviewed by Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Connie Schultz. Smarsh later wrote about this night in the essay, “In the Running,” where she described her consideration of a run for U.S. Senator from Kansas. At the time, I felt she was reserved. Reading the essay, I learned that in the green room before it started, she discussed the choice between being a writer and running for office with Schultz and husband Sherrod Brown. Brown was in Iowa exploring a presidential run, and earlier that day I heard him speak to small group of elected officials and activists about the dignity of work. Smarsh ends the essay by deciding not to run. In retrospect, her reserve that night makes sense.
When Smarsh assumes the persona of “Daughter of the Working Class,” I’m both thrilled and slightly annoyed. Thrilled because she writes from a perspective we hear too rarely: a woman who grew up poor and worked her way into public life. Annoyed because the persona sometimes feels deliberate, as if it stands between the reader and the fuller self behind it. I sensed that in Iowa City and again in this book. She makes the journey worth it.
What I admire most about Sarah Smarsh is how she integrates rural landscape, domestic life, and work into a lived sense of place. Her prose is stripped to essentials, plainspoken without being spare, and that economy draws me in. I respond to this style because it treats labor and class not as abstractions but as daily facts, shaping how people live, eat, and speak to one another. Unlike many essayists, Smarsh’s didactic impulse is present but hidden, carried by narrative rather than argument. The writing rewards our attention without insisting on agreement.
Smarsh is at the height of her writing ability in Bone on the Bone, which appeals on many levels. I highly recommend it.
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