On Reading Books About Being Broke While Not Being Broke

The uncomfortable position most of this book's readers are in

Reading about poverty is its own kind of class act — and not always a flattering one.

The Gap at the Centre of the Genre

There is a specific discomfort that arrives, uninvited, somewhere around page forty of a book about poverty written by someone who has lived it. It is the recognition that you — the reader, the person who bought or borrowed this book, the person with the leisure to sit with it — are almost certainly not the subject. You are the audience. And the audience for books about being broke is, by and large, not broke.

Sarah Smarsh's Heartland names this plainly enough that you cannot look away from it. The book is dedicated to a woman named Betty — Smarsh's grandmother — and the dedication functions as a kind of quiet indictment: this is who the book is really for, and this is who will never read it, not because she couldn't but because the literary ecosystem that produces and distributes and reviews such books was not built with her in mind. The readers are the people who want to understand lives like Betty's. The people living those lives are elsewhere.

It feels important to say this not to discourage the reading — the reading matters — but to be honest about what it does and doesn't accomplish.

This is not a criticism of the writers. Smarsh earns her authority. The problem is structural, and it sits in the reader's hands.

What I keep returning to is how we use these books — whether as a genuine reckoning or as a form of credential. I've read that the poverty memoir can function as evidence of social conscience while leaving everything that produced the poverty untouched. The book becomes an experience the reader has had, rather than an argument that changes anything. It feels important to say this not to discourage the reading — the reading matters — but to be honest about what it does and doesn't accomplish.

The uncomfortable truth is that empathy and change are not the same mechanism. A beautifully rendered account of structural precarity can produce the former without ever activating the latter. And the literary world is very good at rewarding empathy — the starred review, the prize list, the word luminous — while the conditions the book describes go on.

Reading these books honestly means admitting the gap between what moved you and what you did. It means sitting with the possibility that the book served you more than it served anyone in it. That is not a reason to stop reading. It is a reason to read without the comfortable feeling that you've done something.