Smarsh escaped poverty, she believes, because, unlike her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother, she didn’t become a teenage mom. The memoir flickers to life at that home, a humble farmhouse on 160 acres of wheat fields outside Wichita. Through the stories of Smarsh’s witty but withholding mother, her tender but luckless father, her generous step-grandfather and hazardously vivacious grandmother, Smarsh shows how the poor seldom have the vantage to identify the systemic forces suppressing them. Meanwhile, big agribusinesses strangle the region’s family farms, leaving behind a brackish residue of shame — the shame of being poor and white. “People on welfare were presumed ‘lazy,’ and for us there was no more hurtful word,” she writes.

Source: New York Times September 10, 2018 18:56 UTC