“I did it, and it almost killed me!”. That’s the message of Sarah Smarsh’s Heartland. It’s a personal book: What almost killed her is the grip of poverty which has held her family for generations. She “did it” by transcending class barriers to become an accomplished author. Yet hers is not a story of “individual triumph”, she makes clear to a packed crowd in Piazza Castello. Poverty and its seemingly personal consequences are the outcomes of broader political failures.

Set in the farmlands of Kansas, Heartland is a masterful web connecting the personal and the political, critical of the US's inability to grasp the gap between the haves and have-nots. In politics and in life, however, Smarsh recognises that emotions can overpower conceptual abstraction, making class a slippery – and thus forgotten – culprit of social injustice.

Chief among these emotions, shame obfuscates class divides. Smarsh's family self-identified as “middle class”, while she would skip meals at school to avoid a painful unmasking of her hardship. Exploited first by Reaganism and later by Trumpism, in a classic succession of tragedy and farce, the unspoken hardships of Smarsh’s family were leveraged by shameless politicians, fuelling decades of Republican rule in Kansas and some of the most consequential presidential mandates in US history. Minds occupied by daily struggles, Smarsh’s family went along with the radicalisation of the Republican Party like devote church-goers who publicly profess their faith even if not abiding in private. And so they became - or were rather made into - the “white working class”, a political subject that erases the livelihoods of black and brown people, stoking division while (white) wealth remains untouched.

To counter, Smarsh champions nuance, the ability to hold two truths at once and have multiple conversations. The “white working class” could acknowledge that their economic disadvantage co-exists with racial privilege. Progressives, for their part, could do a better job in talking across class lines. Smarsh herself, a staunch progressive, is on a mission with Heartland, to redress the emotional and intimately political toll of poverty, starting from a familiar place. Since 2019, Kansas has had a Democratic governor. Just months ago, her fellow Kansans voted in favour of abortion rights in a state-wide referendum. Smarsh’s family, she reports, is now also on the side of progressive nuance.