I'd read a couple of excerpts from Heartland on different websites earlier last year, and my appetite was whetted as I waited several months for my turn to come on the library waiting list. If you like Barbara Ehrenreich's working class slice-of-life tales, you'll enjoy this memoir of a hardscrabble Kansas upbringing. Smarsh is the daughter of a many-times-married mother, and she managed to avoid getting pregnant at a young age (and hoo boy does she beat that drum a lot). She was therefore able to stay in school and get an advanced degree that allowed her to claw her way up to middle class.
I spent most of the book comparing my own upbringing to Smarsh's - we were probably on equal footing economically, but her parents divorced at a young age, and she had a lot more familial instability and mental illness on both sides of her family that I had to deal with. On the other hand, she grew up in and near Wichita, while I was a lot more isolated geographically. For those who have no idea what it's like to grow up semi-rural and poor, this book will be quite enlightening, but it was a little too heavy on the precise documentation of who-moved-where-when-and-divorced-who than was necessary.
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