Books Written by Sarah Smarsh

Where to Start with Sarah Smarsh

If you want her defining book
→ Heartland (2018) — the memoir of her family and of class in America.

If you want something shorter and lighter
→ She Come By It Natural (2020) — Dolly Parton’s songs read through the women who lived them.

If you want her reporting and opinion writing
→ Bone of the Bone (2024) — eleven years of essays in one volume.

3 Sarah Smarsh Books, in Order

In What Order to Read Sarah Smarsh

The three books stand alone, but they share one family and one place, so publication order works well. Heartland introduces her mother, grandmother and the Kansas farm; She Come By It Natural returns to the same women through Dolly Parton’s music; Bone of the Bone shows the journalism she wrote alongside both books.

If you want to try her before committing to a full memoir, She Come By It Natural is the shortest of the three, and the essays in Bone of the Bone can be read one at a time.

A reading path
1. Heartland (2018)
2. She Come By It Natural (2020)
3. Bone of the Bone (2024)

How Sarah Smarsh Writes: Reporting from Home

Smarsh writes as a journalist about the people she grew up among. In Heartland the family story runs alongside the economics: farm prices, wages, health insurance and welfare law appear in the same chapters as her grandmother’s divorces and her father’s failed business. Her argument is that the problems were structural, “for markets and low wages that we had no control over ourselves,” as she told NPR in 2018.

She resists the idea that her family were victims or that they saw themselves as poor. In the same interview she said she “never in a million years thought that I was poor” as a child, and that her family would have called itself middle class. Much of her writing pushes back against how rural and white working-class people were described in national coverage around the 2016 election, which is also where She Come By It Natural began.

Her style is plain and regional, built on short declarative sentences and Kansas speech; the title She Come By It Natural keeps the grammar of the women she grew up with. Reviewers have praised the voice; the one recurring criticism of Heartland, from The New York Times, was that the letters to an imagined daughter feel sentimental.

Watch

Sarah Smarsh on Heartland

Gramercy Books Bexley · Conversation20202020

▸ 01▸ Heartland

Sarah Smarsh discusses her memoir Heartland with Michael Wilkos of United Way of Central Ohio at the Drexel Theatre in Columbus, Ohio, in an event hosted by Gramercy Books. From the official Gramercy Books Bexley channel.