Smarsh details her family's struggles and dissects the social and political causes and effects of poverty in America.

Sarah Smarsh is the first woman in many generations of her family to rise above cyclical poverty and the conditions that perpetuate it. In Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth, which has been long-listed for the National Book Award, Smarsh recounts not only her own early life in poverty, but also the lives of the generations leading up to her own. For women, cyclical poverty means marrying and having children at a young age, which was true for Smarsh's mother and her grandmother. Poverty also means surviving on low wages, always just barely scraping by to the next paycheck and with no extra to spend on any of the means others may use to get ahead. This was true for her family too.

Driven by her family's backbone of self-sufficiency, Smarsh managed to become the first in her family to go to college. There, she came up against a new challenge, facing stereotypes that pegged her as "white trash" because of her humble upbringing. It was in those years that Smarsh began to understand the socio-economic divide that runs deep in the United States.

Now a fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Smarsh uses her memoir to reflect on the societal and economic factors that contributed to her family's identity. Though some of the hardships her family faced had little to do with being poor, most originated with the systemic problems that plague those in the U.S. living in poverty. Many of these problems stem from the cultural divide between the haves and the have-nots: those with money are the ones making the laws, and in turn, laws tend to benefit people with money more than they do the middle and working classes.

Attitudes toward the working poor only serve to compound the problem. Smarsh writes: