By Sarah Smarsh
Born into a family of generations of teenage mothers who worked hard as farmers' wives, waitresses, or (in more recent times) blue-collar jobs, where there was food on the table but never enough for dental appointments or new shoes, Sarah writes this memoir to her own imagined child. She adores her farmer/construction worker father Nick, one of the few kind men in her family constellation (her step-grandfather Arnie is the other), but has a complicated relationship with her mom. She adores her grandmothers; Nick's mom Theresa is a crusty German Catholic who in turn adores Sarah. Betty, Sarah's maternal grandmother, is only in her 30s when Sarah is born and married to Arnie, her 7th husband. But Arnie loves Betty and works hard to keep his farm going, and they provide more stability to Sarah than her own divorced (and remarried to others) parents, who move so frequently that Sarah changes schools several times each school year, until she moves in with her grandparents and stays in the same high school. There she proves to be a good student and determines to earn a college scholarship, and mostly to not repeat her mother's and maternal grandmother's trend of early motherhood.
I listened to the audio book, narrated by the author, who shares her story with neither sentimentality nor judgment. It's clear she loves her dysfunctional family, but she also makes clear that those in the heartland who grow the produce and raise the animals we eat live on the margins of economic viability, which leads to insecurity and sometimes to social problems like substance abuse and sexual abuse.
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