books. including my sister's keeper, small great things in her most recent spark of light. and on afterwards vice president mike pence's daughter shares important life lessons learned from her father. for complete schedule visit book tv.org. or follow us on twitter, facebook and instagram. here tonight to introduce them. it is a very special person from her time as a ku student. the associate director of undergraduate studies and the university honors lecture in

english. i will add that she takes full credit for her success. please help me welcome dr. mary claytor. welcome. it's really a thrill. i can't even tell you what a thrill it is. i first met sarah before she even started at ku. and was fortunate to have her in my freshman writing seminar called you want to be a writer home. we have a lot of writers. and to have the benefit of the abilities. for the same class or senior year. during those years i watched as sera this here become a tenacious thinker and writer one who was hungry to explore her own world and tell it straight. she has been doing it ever

since. we have the nonfiction writing. the previous education involved eight southern campus schools. she has reported on socio- economic class politics. for the guardian, the new york times. the new yorkers in harpers. and her essays and criticism on cultural boundaries had been published by the texas observer. in the first person on mars were both listed as notables in best american essays. i'm looking for them in readers. she was a recent jones school

of government. her debut book a memoir of working hard and being broken the richest country on earth. as a meditation on the realities of intergenerational poverty and was recently long listed for the national book award. in the nonfiction category. i am honored to introduce. [applause]. [applause].

i know i have a lot of old friends in the audience and old mentors and current friends. i am so honored by the turnout. think you to the public library which is an incredible institution. it has long been the envy of my heart. for about 15 years even though from south central campus. it was my home for a lot of my life. and it is so dear to me. and thank you to liberty to hosting.

lawrence frick in kansas. c-span is here i learned about the socio- economic class. and it intersects with a lot of aspects of american identity. also an aspect it was kind of under discussed at our 21st century digital post place moment. it is just raw geography. we will talk quite a bit about place and for that reason i thought i would tell you why lawrence is such a special place to me. you will glean some of the themes of my book. i grew up on a wheat and cattle farm. i was raised largely by my

grandparents who left school in sixth and ninth grade respectively to work. a first generation college student in the first of my family to have the privilege really had been paid for my passion rather than breaking my body and labor. i had worked those sorts of jobs before. we just had immense and internal gratitude. that someone pays me to do what i have a sense of. as a kid in a roll. west of wichita. go eagles. in that school i was a very

ambitious kid. a kid like me where a family where education hasn't really been harnessed but because there wasn't that the time or resellers to harm. public school for me was the only place that i was going to access this and in that school and this was like a pre- internet moment. it was pre- internet for my people. i did not have a computer until i was a sophomore in college. in people's childhood from the 1980s childhood. it was more like the 1980s

and 2000. not something to do with economic advantage. in the summer you work with that. nonetheless i applied for this. honors academy and i got accepted. maybe a hundred kids in the state where i it happened to be at ku. i think that was the first time i was ever in lawrence. we were so grounded by our farm and also assented by our economic station that even this piece of the country so close it felt for me very exotic and faraway. i remember thinking all of these beautiful trees and

hills. i got to sit in college classrooms on the university of kansas campus and have my intelligence and worth validated by a super fancy professor who did fancy things. it was a transformative moment for me. because of that experience coming here for my undergrad. whatever you see me doing as a journalist. i graduated in 2002. and i actually was the last member i was a member of the last class in that school to receive an old-fashioned newspaper training. it was right on that moment on the cusp of what it was called media convergence. and from then on the training looked a little different. and it was to equip students

in various media. what a fine school and has a lot to do with where i am today. i double majored in english and that's where i got to know the delightful mary claytor. i went to new york for futures. .. .. i was thinking like i'm looking around and there's nobody from where i'm from. there's nobody who was involved in agriculture, let alone rural

life, and so i -- that was a formative experience and then i think in that moment, i can't unfortunately -- maybe somebody can help me done can remember whose quote this is. i didn't become a kansan until i win to new york. and i remember -- like i was like the kid in school that -- i saids was very ambitious, straight-a kid, boobyish and had goals and on a war path of accomplish accomplishment and how that relates to the class issues i explore. but i -- so i was the kid that teachers thought, oh, she's going to leave kingman and people might have predicted i was the kid that someone was going to say, she got out. a phrase i take real issue with and i'll talk about that. but when i was in new york it was like, i'm surrounded by kids

from the ohio version of me in west virginia and when they got to new york some of them were like -- they became new yorkers and they breathed a sigh of relief, this where is i was meant to be. for me it this opposite. fortified my since of belonging to my home which is never i thought of as a place to escape or leave but the economic realities of the country and in particular my industry required that i leave in some ways to accomplish the things i wanted to do. but i finished grad school and the second i did that i moved back to lawrence, kansas, and i lived here happily as a free lance journalist, a professor for some years, also a grant writer for some area social service agencies that have everything to do with the issues i talk about in my book. one of which is van gogh. i was --

[applause] >> i was very fortunate to write grant proposals and do development work for them, also kansas legal services in topeka, where i learned, again in helping apply for federal grants for low-income kansans to have fair legal representation in our jewish system. i learned a lot of -- the judicial sim to i learned about the violence against women act. this -- my dad and grandpa, construction workers and farmers in my book, and that's kind of what the vision of the working class, specifically the white working class. but women are really the stars of the show, my mother and grandmother and for that reason, these policies that so keenly affect women, my education, when i was in the nonprofit sector, was huge.

so, i'm going to read just a little bit from this book. i always feel like when writers hold forth for too long or like to hear themselves read their own sentences, it's aen offputting even for me as a fellow write sore i won't do that but i have a few more points to read from the book and i'm looking forward to your questions, too. so, i talked a little bit about my relationship to this place of kansas, and lawrence, within the broader context of kansas. lawrence specifically -- i'm from south central kansas, as i said, and lawrence actually has a special place in my heart for having -- i was pondering this on my way here in my travels. i bet some of you might feel this way, too, and that's why you're here probably in this town. i kind of feel like, or hope,

that lawrence and my work or lawrence and i have some particular things in common. so, i've always been someone who is interested in history and reverent to the past, and that is a theme in this book. they're calling it a memoir but it's really a story but my family. i work on it for 15 years. a lot of research and some was just piecing together the story of my family from the chaos that poverty tends to beget, and i was a kid that was aware of the legacies into which i was born, many of which are negative and dangerous even. i feel like lawrence is a place that embraces and is always aware of its history in which is so crucial not just to kansas but to the whole country.

also a place -- this is particularly relevant to my journalism, if any of you read my essays and what i do, lawrence is a place, like me, i think, that defies the political and cultural expectations of this so-called red state. heartland -- [applause] so, while holiday heartland "is not a political book or argue. the way i see it, it is a challenge to readers who might stereotype our place and our people as a cultural or political monolith, to consider in fact the complexity and nuance of the people on the ground, and i don't have to convince you of that because you already know it. lawrence and i -- also, as i recall you like beer a lot. i feel like we have that in

common. so, "heartland" is about class and place, where i'm from. right now, there's this kind of buzz word in national discourse, raise your hand if you have heard the phrase -- which i feel like if it's not new, it's at least newly fixate on or recently fixated upon, the rural-urban divide. so, most people raised their hand. i mentioned before noting as a kid that grew up on a farm in kansas, when i did things like attend an ivy league school for graduate school, even in the context of the wonderful university of kansas, i was -- i found myself an outlier in many ways so where i'm from would seem to be a rare and kind of peculiar place in the modern

postero, highly urbanized american story. i'm going to read a little bit about that supposed divide and what i think about it, but i wanted to say that i have this new vantage, just in the past week -- for several use years i've been receiving messages from people all over not just the country and the world. so few people write but class and look at these wishes specifically and particular from -- with the innership of the particular place i come from, that there's just no one else for someone to feel like they recognize their own story, so i don't think it's necessarily even about me or my work. i do work hard and i hope that there's something good about it, but there's just such a real dirth of people who have an experience similar to mine in the particulars, who have a platform in national discussion. i hear from a lot of people and

that's been true for several years, but this past week has -- when this book came out on september 18th, and it has been incredible and so humbling and mind-blowing and gratifying, also validating of what i always suspected, that, yeah, i come from a farm but this idea of a rural -- a divide -- innately different kind of people occupying different regions of the country, that's a real fallacy and a dangerous one, and people from all walks of life, different skin comes, different backgrounds, every corner of the country, come through the lines and say, our stories are different and yet they're the same, and i think that might have something to do were the subtitle of the book which is: a memoir -- i'll read it and then want you to raise your hand if -- no, i want you to clap if you feel me on this. a memoir of working hard and being broke in the richest country on earth.

[applause] >> and so that unison of sound is you knowing that we have a little bit of problem in the stories we tell ourselves or have been telling ourselves for centuries about this place, there's this american dream that involves hard work and you get what you work for and really ultimately this is a meritocracy, maybe not so much. and i think that is what is really speaking to people and folks are yearning to have validated. the rural piece is a kind of special nitch within that but i wanted to point that out. so this is a real moment of division, the way we perceive ourselves as a nation. the categorizing we do and

there's real value in something essential in discussing and parsing the ways that our identities differ and how that comes with particular privileges and disadvantages. that's an essential confidence but i think, too that along the way we should make sure we're talking but what we all have in common, too, for the sake of progress and unity. i'm not talking about, like, seeking empathy or compassion for someone who wishes harm upon you or your group or demographic. i happen to believe -- i've been a reporter long enough i think i have some authority to form this theory -- those folks are really like way fewer of the american population than one would think from watching cable news, and if you just, like, leave your

living room and turn off whatever it is, msnbc, cnn, fox, and look your neighbors in the eye and have a conversation, it turns out it isn't just like a bunch of hateful bad guys out there. oh, they're out there. but i think that i -- i happen to be a member of the industry that is maybe guilty of this, of fixation on conflict, which drives up ratings, sells papers. it is essential to address it and we are in a crisis situation in many ways as a country. but-gosh, i think we're perverting our understanding of ourselves if along the way we're not talking about how we're also mostly all in this together and deposit people who might disagree on how to get to the same outcome. i'll read to you a little bit about the people i come from.

this first passage is from 1987. i was six years old. i was living in a house that my construction worker father and fourth generation wheat farmer father built with his own hands. west of wichita, and i hung out with my maternal grandma a lot, who was scandal obviously young for a grandmother. she was 34 when she became a grandma to me, and for that reason she was more like a second mom to me than a grandma and some ways my mom was more like a sister than a mother. but here i'm hanging out with grandma betty. when i read this, i can't remember for sure if this comes up in this passage but if i shift into the second person and i say, you, this has agency to do with betty being 34 when she became a grandma. so i'm a fifth generation farm

kid on my dad's side. on my mom's side of my family, they were not such a rural lot. they were just kind of more of a -- like a lot of single mothers in poverty with mostly female children, roving the midwestern highways, working in diners and having a very transient experience and escaping abusive men, and my grandma met a farmer and that's how my mom met my dad, who was a farm boy out in that area, and just kind of like these two very different groups convened. another that ma concern side of my family i'm the inheriter of a legacy of teen pregnancy. when i researching the bike found as far back as i can find in any record that were kept -- back to times of corsets, i'm the first woman, female, descendent in my direct maternal

line who did not have a baby before age 20, so when you hear me say you in this passage, i'm speaking to the would-be child or baby that i might have had as a teenager, which i had a very keen awareness of at a very young age, younger than any young woman or child, really, even, should have to be mindful and even fearful of such a thing or family pattern. so this book is actually -- while you meet see this as a met for myriad things, it is described as kind of an entity or an imagined child i'm intending to avoid having. or conceiving. okay. i early 1987, grandma betty had tired of the long drive between

the courthouse in wichita and the farm in the middle of nowhere. she was a -- after a young life of working in -- on factory floors and as a diner waitress and just the very few opportunities that were available to women in the work force as a female in poverty in the 1960s, my grandma's era -- by the time i came along, she had been fitted from a federal grant by way of title ix legislation that allowed lower to attend what they call business school, and so she learned how to type, how to file things and just kind of run an office and she ended up landing a gig as a secretary in the courthouse in downtown wichita and ends up as a probation officer so the fact that she would like put on high heels from k-mart and click through

the lobby was like very, like, glamorous in our family. so, she had tired of the long commute she had between her job in downtown wichita and she had married this farmer and is way outest. grandma arnie said she could quit her job but she didn't want to quit. when had she not worked? she was proud of what she did at the courthouse. what, she said? i got used to the big money. she received a meager salary, accepted without negotiation, as were most women's salaries, but living at the farm, she paid no rent or mortgage, a lot of what she earned went into savings for the first time in her life, or to bail out a friend who needed help the way betty herself had needed it so long ago. she was tired of the long daily commute from the farm, but it

made more sense, the thought to keep her beyond and find a house in witch which, which could be a long-term property investment nye how. for all the moving in her haas and even her many years on the charges wichita was still her home. i went along as she visited open houses. i liked the brown brick house with the glass coffee table. they want $60,000 for it, grandma betty said. that is too high. back home, i told mom, we went to a house that cost $60,000. that's not much, she said. some house even cost $100,000. i spent the next week reporting this to anyone who would listen. grandma found a tiny square house on second street, near downtown wichita, near both her childhood home and the mexican

american neighborhood where her life-long best friend has grown up. grandma's new place was just a five-minute drive from her job at the courthouse. she would stay at the house during the week and spend weekends at the farm with grandpa, she said. he agreed to drive to wichita on week nights after his chores unless the farm kept him tied up late into the evening. grandma bought the house for $25,000 through an owner carry mortgage with balloon payments. a good trick in which the seller makes the monthly payments for the first couple of years until the buyer's payments kick in and increase in amount over time. it's like being carried by jesus on a sandy beach and paying him interest for every footprint. the yellow orange brick house was built around the time betty was born, 1945, and had a concrete porch and four rooms, small bedroom and living room

with wood floors and an eat insure kitchen with a small bathroom connected to it. to turn the unfinished basement into more space, dad and grandma arne swung sledgehammers at a wall and matt and i picked up the chalky pieces to put in a garbage bag. we jumped on mattress covered in powder plaster on the cool cement flooren in dad started the circling saw to cut studs and the noise drove us outside. second street was busy with cars, and i kept matt at a safe distance. i held his hand as we wandered toward the old tiny brick general store with the 7up sign that read, gorge's. it was one of the last family, run grossers in town and grandma had walked there as a kid herself. george was a thousand years old and gave us candy out of a jar on the counter above us. after supper at the new house, matt went back to the country with our parents.

grandpa arne went back to his farm to be there for early morning shores. i stayed in wichita with a grandma betty to help her clean her new house. this is a place where you clean your own house. we scrubbed the kitchen floor, the counter, the stove, and refrigerator, grandma couldn't believe how filthy somebody left the place. we scraped at the wall paper and grandma couldn't believe how many sloppy lives wall paper somebody left on the walls. i pried staple's them dre wall and then dips a trowel in plaster to smear across holes. page six. we had a tiny black and white television going and when the 10:00 news came on, grandma was ready to hang it up. we were hungry but the new house was empty. for supper, we eat baloney sandwiches and potato shoe

strings from a greasy metal can. grandma drove to us mcdonald's and told me to get whatever i wanted. she often toll me to get whatever i wanted when we wasn't to fastfood restaurants and i in other words her generosity was because of the hard life she had lived. i word order it a hot fudge sundae. back at the new house, we dragged a mattress and sheets into the living room and she moved the television to the corner next to us. she fiddled with the antenna until i saw johnny carson. it felt like a great adventure to eat ice cream on a bare mattress on the hardwood few of of empty echoing house while have the. this show. grandma betty switched off the tv and the lights. you done good work today, sarah smurf, she say. my nickname if had forgotten that darkness and quiet were not

the same in wichita as they were in the country. the cars seemed bright and loud driving by just past the front door, which opened into the room where we lay. i thought and thought and thought, like i did every night, until i wished my mind had a switch i could flip. i felt grandma get up in the almost darkness. she said she was going to good pe and would i like a glass of water. she turned on the kitchen light and screamed. oh, god, sarah, get up. hundreds of cockroaches ran across the kitchen linoleum in a big, dark swarm. hit by sudden light, some of them ran to the bathroom. others scurried around the bottom of the refrigerator. some ran toward the dark dining room and our mattress. i stood up on the mattress and took a step back.

a line overarches started up the side of the mattress. grandma was searching for her sandals. those filthy bastardses, she said. get your stuff. we're blowing this joint. then was after midnight and we were rolling down the familiar strip of highway 54, stars, cattle, wheat fields that were wild prairie grass, back when that same route west was called cannonball stage coach road. grandma was cursing the cockroaches of the earth, wishing for spiders or june bugs, anything but a filthy cockroach because she hated the bastards. less than an hour later we were back in the country, i climbing outside of grandma's car dough sound of locusts and the smell of the pigs and cows that lay sleep neglect darkness. grandma quieted sash sasha

vujacica, the germ january shepherd. we went up the familiar creaking old wood steps, covered in nubby blue can't. if id with to be an old woman, and the trends of my early life continue, by the time i die, half the kansas population will live in only five of 105 counties. people consolidated like seed companies. there's a strength in that. environmentalists and economists might suggest. this sort of moment of the city that we're having. but perhaps a greater weakness. president dwight eisenhower, native of rural kansas, said, whatever america hopes to bring to pass in the world must first come to pass in the heart of america. the countryside is no more our nation's heart than are its cities and rural people aren't

more noble and dignified for their dirty work in fields. but to devalue in our social investments, and our language, the people who tend crops and livestock, or to refer to their place as flyover country, is to forget not just a country's foundations but its connection to the earth, to cycles of life scarcely witnessed and misunderstood in concrete landscapes. for wendell berry's vision of a sustainable world -- i talk about him in a previous chapter, kentucky farmer -- for his vision of a sustainable world, one imbalanced both economically and environmentally, the american heart needs a strong, well-supported, well-respected chamber outside its mentropolis. the life force that flows back

into it, those places we hear our dwindling and where farms are going over and economic despair has sit in, the life source that flows back into this places will likely be from other places. the meat packing towns of western kansas, for instance, have become some of the most ethnic include diverse places in the country, as immigrants stream in from mexico, the middle east and central america to take factory jobs amid industrial agriculture boom. statewide, according to the 2010 census, many rural counties had declined and more than eight out of ten kansans were white, but the hispanic population has grown by 60% in the last ten years. that's a demographic shift not without tensions but one that had been embraced by some small town whites you knew their home must change to survive.

of all the gifts and challenges rural life, one of its most wonderful paradoxes is that closeness, born of our biggest spaces, a deep intimacy forced not by the proximity ofs of apartments but by having only one neighbor within three miles to help when you're sick, when your tractor is down and you need a ride, then snow starts drift south check on the old will with the mean dog regardless whether you like her. when i was a teenager in 1996 i went to new york city nor first time to compete in a national communications contest i qualified for from my tiny rural high school. we visited the statue of liberty, which i was excited to climb inside. as i needer the crown, ascending a narrow, winding staircase with hundreds people packed in front of me and behind me, i suddenly

had trouble bringing. i wasn't afraid of heights but terror rows up in me and i looked around and realized i couldn't get out if i had to. i didn't know it but i was having a panic attack. maybe not an altogether irrational one, but resulting from claustrophobia i'd never been anywhere crowded enough to know i had. while the small space echoed with many voices, i closed my eyes and took deep breaths. i turned to the stranger behind me and looked him in the eyes, like we were the only two people on earth. he was from boston, as i recall. i asked if he wanted to take the spoolingol quest, span -- the psychology yack quest. panic being coursing through me but i hid it. my voice extended steady.

the man laughed and said, okay. i told him a long story about him on a journey by foot through a forest and med madeows, i paused to ask him questions. what animal is on the other side of the wall of vines? what do you see in the water when you kneel next to the pond and look down? the concept was something i'd heard somewhere, a person leading someone else through a kind of mental maize but mostly i made its all up. the crowd around us had gotten quiet to listen. he answered, and i told him whale thought his mind said but who he was. just like, how did i -- like that kid was so much braver than i am. i just can't even -- okay. he and others nodded along in

amazement or at least amusement. as for me, i had something to focus my mind on as we inched, one suspended metal step at a time, toward the crown of the statue of liberty. i had harnessed an inner calm that can be found anywhere, but that for me had been cultivated in rural lands, under a state flag that bore the latin phrase, to the stars through difficulties. when we got to the top i wasn't scared anymore. someone took my picture. i relieved smile, view of new york harbor behind he through the little windows that at night glow as jewels in her crown. that'ses how i had come to resolve the tensions of my childhood. of my family members' lives. about country and city.

i craved the opportunity that cities contained and pursue it but most essential my well-being was the unon distribute freedom of a flat horizon. when i was well into adulthood the united states developed the notion that a dividing line of class and geography separated two essentially different kinds of people. i knew that wasn't right because both sides existed in me. where i was from, and what i hoped to do in life. the places that best sustained me and the places i needed to go for the things i meant to do. straddling that supposed line as i did, knew it was about a difference of experience, not of humanity. you would have been born on one side of that perceived divide. but that wouldn't have predicted anything about the core of you.

not your politics, and most definitely not your character. it would have predicted the things you saw and did to some extent, and one defining psychological tension guaranteed by your country's economy. every day you would decide whether to stay, go, or try to go. and if you went, no matter where you ended up, like every immigrant, you would still feel the inveighs dirtoff your motherland on the souls of your feet. [applause]

>> thank you so much. and i want to talk to all of you now. i understand that someone is going to have a microphone or maybe it's set up, and -- yes. christian -- >> do ask questions, no observations, we have a large audience and a very short amount of time so please be mindful and only questions. >> thank you for coming. is this on? thank you for coming back to lawrence, few days nothing my mail box came the ku alumni magazine with your photo on the front. >> yes, that was -- quite an honor. >> my question is, two. in that article it mentions you have said you don't want to bring your child into poverty, and i don't think you're in poverty now. and the other part is, about your family, your grand rapids, your family and again, the

kingman and elsewhere, i assume that they were part of your writing process, that they knew what you were write become and are they going to get residuals from -- [laughter] >> they might also like to know the answer to that question. yes, my family was -- they're kind of different schools of thought about writing memoir or stories about one's family. one school of thought is sort of, you write whatever you think and somebody else sees it different, then they can write their own damn book and that's not how i work as a journalist or a memoirist. i think to handle someone's life and do this clunky thing of transforming the infinite human experience into a ultimately finite and inadequate character, is -- that's quite a gift to

receive, to have someone's blessing to do that. i always seek that blessing, and it's something to -- that i in my approach different artists would have different opinions on this but i was checking in with them at every step of the way, and many of the passages in the book are written about event where is wasn't even born yet or present, and those are constructed from many hours of interviews with close members of my family over the years, and so they -- they also, like said they didn't want to rate until it came out. i was offering along -- i should say that other than my mother, i'm like the connell become person in my family so i think they didn't read us because they were like, it's probably boring. [laughter] you think i'm joking but i'm serious.

and -- but this is so moving to me, i have to share it with you. my grandma is kind of the star hoff the show, betty, so i was concerned -- a lot of powerful characters but she is just kind of like a very vivacious and sharp-witted, salt where broad from the hard luck life, and just that he most generous spirit. if anyone had a right to feel shorted by the book, even though i made every attempt to get things right, um pat lit nobody can in this subjective thing we call reality -- she read it and she texted me, i laughed, i cried, and then the first thing she said had nothing to do with hoe shoe was represented. there's this like the darkest moments of her life in this book. let's say, one of her husbands breaking her jaw.

as they called it back then, back-alley abortion in a preroe v. wade era and she was trying to escape that husband. so she very generously let me tell those stories and in her text to me, the only thing she said was, i am so sorry that you had so much sorrow and strife as a child. i didn't know it. i'm proud to come from those people and they're with me every step of the way. question. >> by any chance did that film "pick mick" have in effect -- >> the film picnic. >> no. i don't fully -- i don't think so. that may d that's an easy answer. >> hi, sarah. i wonder, the themes of your book, class, and this perceived divide, how do you those

reflected in other popular culture now and films and novels, perhaps, and other -- >> right. thank you. excellent question. much of what i do as a journalist, which is talk about class, requires that i am simultaneously operating in this media critic and that's because i take such great issue with the way that these narratives are often cast, usually by upper class white people who maybe have the best of intentions but nonetheless don't bat an eye about suggesting that the entire working class is white or male or conservative. none of those things are true, of course. where i come from is no more a monolith than any other group, and so i do -- i feel like most of the protrails that we see -- portrayals -- right the thank you news media portrayal is a politicized one and it has to do with this heated moment that

we're in as a country politically, but even going back to my childhood, i felt like anytime i saw where i was from represented in movie it was a stereotype oar caricature, and i don't think that's -- sometimes there's just some rote classes and it's done with a hateful spirit but i think more often it's just like very well-intentioned story tellers who don't know any better. that's why we need diversification of our college campuses, newsrooms and so many spaces that hold power in this society. we -- often consider diverse si as we absolutely should, along lines of race and gender and other aspects of identity, but it's almost fairly recently we are acknowledging class as an aspect outright that intersection wiz all of the above but also is a particular conundrum in this moment of

historic wealth inequality. so i think most of the stories right now don't get it right and it's because there's nobody from those places or experiences who ends up with the privilege of telling them. >> yes. >> hi, sarah. so nice to read your book and i wanted to ask you something but the writing process. it feels to me so much like you took 15 years to write best thaws it's so authentic and i love the approach that you take, writing it to an unborn daughter, and so i wonder, at what point in your writing process did you choose to do that? that. >> that is such a great question. i'm a former english professor and the writers among us might enjoy this question. so, i knew i was believe it or

not. i you read the book you'll believe me when i say i'll shoot you straight and wouldn't say this if it wasn't three-quarters knew when i was a child i was going write this book. i didn't know what exactly it was going to look like or what relevance it might have, but i would say specifically to my grandma, grandma some day i'm going write a book but my family, strategically made decisions in my life in order to become a reality, so i was the editor of my rural high school newspaper, i double majored in journalism and creative writing which represents a integration of fact and research based nonfiction and a more artful sort of narrative telling which is the integration of the core of the book. so that's a long way of saying that it was finally during the -- my years as a journalist, which funny enough were -- in some parts, serve to pay the

bills because i had to get by. i didn't have two penny is to run together and things like artistic and creative pursuits take time and resources and when you have to wait tables or -- which i did and tended bar and also as free lance journalist. that kind of inherit errantly slows down the process but the beauty of it and what i think is the kairos of it, the greek time for right timing -- that that forced me to gain a blotter awareness and a language for articulate -- articulating why i senses my family's story my might, the issue of class and policy and politics and place. a that i never could have -- never could have articulated as a very young person when i was trying to get this going. so, those pieces of the puzzle, because that happened over so many years i have these very personal passages, some of

which -- there are many pages that are almost verbatim of something i wrote my senior year at ku and the passages that are little bit more of a big picture kind of cultural commentary or analysis came later and then the weren't quite gelling, and i could sense that, like, okay, i've published some essays and pieces of journalism that got a lot of attention around the world, and i found this correlation in that process. the more i felt like i was going to throw up the night before they came out, the more people appreciated them, and that of course had to do with vulnerability and opening up of a wound that many people carry for different reasons, called shame, and i was thinking to myself, okay, have this book where things aren't clicking to

and if it were published tomorrow i would not feel like i need to throw up and that might be a problem. so i was kind of like keeping kg the readers arm's length with self-protecting, and then it was like, oh, my god, this affect of my psyche that has been so deep that i almost never even consciously think about it, which is this very true dialogue i had growing up with this would-be daughter. used to say to myself, when i was a teenager, and i had to make some difficult decision that maybe in some other family, parents would come in and help with, i would say to myself, what would i want for my daughter? what i would tell my tour do? and that was way of kind of -- i was in a -- the context of a world where my own value was so unacknowledged in this capitalist society that my family appeared to be on the

losing end of and if we're a meritocracy it suggests we're losers and i absorbed that as a sensitive child and this conversation i would have with the daughter, was my way of, like -- i newell she would be so sacred i would do anything to do right by her and i could rise to that challenge more than doing right by myself and that guided me for many years and that was the framework for the book, and then i felt like, yes issue was definitely feel like i'm going to throw up if people read this. mission accomplished. >> any other questions? >> hi, sarah. i'm about 100 pages intoure book right now and one of the more

moving things i can remember reading. >> thanks. >> you clearly write with -- you clearly have some such. this -- sympathy about your family and other people in your situation. do you have any sense of survivor's guilt? >> what an interesting question. an important one. really what i described here, i think i'm hearing from so many people about, even though the particulars are so different, the stories are the same. since we actually are living in a class structure, millions of people is in country have an experience of sort of more than one rung of that ladder, whether it was what way call upward mow ability or downward mobile and these things are not static, and so i hear from a lot of people who do have precisely that,

survivor's guilt, and for, like, escaping as we say the same outcomes that their beloved family members experienced. you know, i think that when maybe when i was like a student at k and -- that was the defining moment that first began my path of having a different life experience than than my family. as i describe in the book for some kid supposedly those are like the wildest and most fun years of abandon and they were the hardest years of my life. i loved being a student and i loved academia and ku, but as i say in the book, there's a reason that so few people make the sort of like -- cross this perceived divide in any lasting way, and it is because it is a very painful crossing. it means that you're

accomplishing the goals that are essential to your own survival and well-being, good news, but then by definition, you are no longer the same as the people you love the most in the world. in some -- in terms of experience and just maybe even just language, like, i tell people i speak two versions of english, done country and fancy, and tonight i'm mostly using fancy. so, that was painful for me because i was like i said earlier, never a kid that won wanted to quote-unquote get out. i love my home and my family and yet theirs this something about my path -- a good path that one of the pain. aspectsaspects of that means thd people who share my story in their own ways, never completely block from that point on in any group. so i'm sort of odd within my

professional industry, for where i come from and i'm odd where i come from for what i do for a living. you know what i mean? but i'm a -- no. as far as if i'm carrying that as a weight now, no. maybe in part because my family is so lovely and happy for me and i'm honestly like amazed and delight that i get to do there is for a living, and i don't feel guilty but nothing. [applause] >> we do have time for one more question. >> i just kind of wondering if you could but on your journal

gist had and you mentioned grandma betty, how she benefited from a legislative effort to improve her economic place, et cetera, we're kind of at a time where that is really, depending how how you look at it, we're beyond that. we now live in a racism doesn't exist anymore according to -- >> ow mean what some people say. >> right. right. we have a -- our chief justice of the supreme court, famously, said racism doesn't exist miami. i'm paraphrasing. i if you could redirect on that place where we and are along this lines. >> in relation to policy -- >> yeah, exactly. policy, hour grandma benefited from policy. we're not beyond that. maybe. maybe not. >> i think we absolutely are and not the gains that were applied by women and people of color and historyie marginalized groups, were made in part because the

federal government said, if we leave this up to local communities, the job ain't going to get done so we're just going to say, these schools must integrate, these women must be allowed to work in these spaces, and so i do sense that we're at a moment where there is a story about our country that maybe it's short-term memory that like the gains we have made are because of those programs and so, therefore. >> remain or be even more robust, as opposed to claiming we are post race or post gender in those -- in terms of a social hierarchy, and therefore tear down public programs. when i was an undergraduate at the university of kansas i was a straight-a student, meeting people like mary claydor and an thereto moment i wassing a

excelling as a kid on the campus i didn't know what the term graduate school minute. so for kids who come from places like i do, just like the language of talking about the things that are taken for grants by middle or upper middle class people was so foreign to me that i couldn't -- i was likelying the biggest dream could i dream for myself and there were a federally funded program on the ku campus called the mcnair scholars program and they found me or i found them and my senior year, of college, they encouraged me to apply grad what school. i will confess that i had no intention of going to grad what school once they explained what it was. but it came with a summer research stipend to spend a summer where i wouldn't have to, like, break my back at the grain

elevator in kingman county during the wheat harvest or, like, be objective identified -- objectivewide as baggy mail server. instead i could use that stipend to research this book, and i also got an undergrad wad research award i can't remember if that goes to college of liberal arts and science or what. so, that was a federal program that played such a pivotal role in my life that i like to point out, some people would love to look at my story and say, see, you work hard, all good. the way i look at it is, i'm not their talk but some individual triumph. i'm here as someone who really represents the exception to the rule in terms of just the odds of -- if you're born poor, probably going stay poor no matter how hard you work. so my job now is to shine a light on that fact for all those

people who don't have the privilege of being at this podium. [applause] >> hello. the book came out -- i read an advance copy so. how many people have read this book so far? there's so many books to be sold tonight. seriously, this book -- i'm a native topekan and i thing a lot of kansans don't know this story. this is a powerful and timely story. i implore you to sell out the raven tonight for sarah.

what do you say about that? [applause] >> thank you for coming and thank you for sharing a really -- >> thank you. thank you. thank you. thank you. thank you. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> here's a look at authors recently feature order "after words" 0, our weekly author interview program. a look at lou women's anger has been used to create transformative political movements throughout history. trump 2020 campaign yesterdays adviser and fox news guest analyst, gina louden, offered her thoughts on the current political climate. journalist beth macy reported on the opioid crisis in america.

in the coming weeks republican senator ben sasse of nebraska while argue the country lack us unitsy and will offer thoughts how to repair. jose antonio vargas will discuss his life as onundocumented immigrant. and charlotte shares important lesson she learned groom her father. >> one thing i talk about my dad encouraging me, he told me this phrase, speak your dreams and always tells people when kid come to him and on the campaign trail this happened a couple times -- they would say i kind of want to go into politics one day member and you can tell they're always a little bit anxious about saying that and he always says, speak your dreams. that's the first step, tell people you want to do something. so i think that over the years and growing up, my parents saw

me as a story-teller from a very young age, and so they always encouraged me to not only speak my dreams but also they were kind of speaking them to me. >> "after words" airs saturdays at 10:00 p.m. and sundays at p.m. eastern and pacific on book tv on c-span2. all previous "after words" programs are available to watch online at booktv.org. >> c-span launched book of the 20 years ago. and since then we have covered thousands of authors and book festivals. spanning more than 54,000 hours. in 2008 we interviewed former professional tennis player and gender equality advocate, billy jean king. >> for me it changed my life, every time i go out the door since that moment in time, 35 years ago, when i played against bobby rigs, i would think every single day somebody brings it up where they are, what the

remember, how it fakedded them. so people are crying and telling me their story. particularly fathers will come up to me, and daughters and say -- come up with tears in their eyes and say, i just have to 'e tell you something i. was ten years old, for instance. when i watched your match and now i have a daughter, and i raise her differently because i watched that match that night. >> you can watch this and all other booktv programs from the past 20 years at book there.org. type the author's name and the word "book" in the search bar at the top of the page. >> you're watching booktv on c-span 2. next up, we visit lake havasu, arizona, to explore the literary culture of that western city. after that, psychologist jean safer discusses relationships that are divided by politics. her upcoming back