What's it like to be born into poverty in Kansas? Sarah Smarsh will be here to talk about

her memoir, Heartland. Why doesn't every American have the right to vote? Alan Lichtman will

be here to discuss his book, The Embattled Vote in America. Alexander Alter will give

us an update from the literary world. Plus, we'll talk about what we and the wider world

are reading. This is the Book of View podcast from The New York Times. I'm Pamela Paul.

Sarah Smarsh joins us now from Wichita Kansas. Her new book is called Heartland, a memoir

of working hard and being broke in the richest country on earth. Sarah, thanks so much for

being here. Thank you so much for having me. So you've worked as a journalist. You've

written about class and poverty and politics and policy. And you're still right about all

of that in this book, but it's a memoir. Why did you decide to write about yourself and

make it personal? You know that process actually worked sort of in the opposite direction

of what you just described by which I mean, even as a kid, I knew that someday I was going

to write a book about my family. And that was an intention that I held as a teenager

and as an undergraduate. And then I did my my NSA with a focus on piecing together a

family narrative. I understood that there was something compelling about my family and

rare and increasingly rare in the American story, might have grown up on a small family

farm in Kansas. And then along the way, interestingly enough, as I was working as a journalist and

writing about issues like class that my upbringing gave me a particular vantage on that sort

of allowed me to acquire the language for articulating and understanding what I had

felt just at a gut level, which is that my family's story has everything to do with public

forces like politics and policy. And so I attempted to fold those kind of understandings into

the narrative. So even growing up, you sense that there was something special and interesting

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