Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

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This book is poverty porn. I live in this area (Dayton/Middletown) and grew up in an Appalachian area. I too, left for college, and then came back. I thought this book would tell the story of a population of people with resilience, and pride. Instead, it is another hack story of "Pull yourself up by your bootstraps" and "I did it, so there is no reason that you can't". I read it through, but honestly wanted to stop about half-way. This books panders, and is lazily written. Read Elizabeth Catte instead.

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With good reason, Hillbilly Elegy received widespread attention when it was first published. Put on the market by Harper in 2016, it coincided with the rise of Donald Trump as a presidential candidate and his getting elected soon thereafter. His popularity was attributed to his being able to speak on behalf of poor white Americans, especially those from the south who had supposedly been neglected by Democratic administrations. To my knowledge, Mr. Trump did not use the term, “hillbilly” to refer to his loyal supporters but Vance identifies hillbilly people as Trump supporters. Understanding them came to mean also understanding Trump’s inveterate supporters. In any case, this book offers a penetrating insight into the people who live in Appalachia, mostly under-privileged whites who allegedly claim Scot-Irish descendence, a cultural note discussed far too briefly. The author writes his book in a compelling and disarming manner, boldly revealing personal family information, sometimes in a startling way. This combination helped give Hillbilly Elegy considerable attention. The author tells us that he grew up, surrounded by his extended family, in one of the many hollows (“hollers”) scoured into the Alleghany Mountains near Jackson, Kentucky, and so his book puts a spot light on his mountain people, a harsh light. Many of them manifest varying levels of paranoia, to tell the truth. His grandfather’s obsession with guns and a willingness to draw one from behind his back at the slightest threat, his grandmother’s use of foul language and his mother’s abuse of drugs and her chronic inability to keep a husband or boyfriend are examples of this neurotic-paranoiac behavior. In addition, many of the author’s relatives and friends are described as “welfare queens,” some who “drive a Cadillac,” allergic to holding a job, and hostile to the world outside, interest in politics being unquestionably peripheral. I concluded that a large part of the behavior described in Hillbilly is reminiscent of many poor families, working class and non-working, including Mexican American families and other minority families of color in the United States. Hillbilly thus confirmed in my mind that skin color and cultural antecedence are only casual differences among underprivileged people and they all feel put upon by the people who do not live on the edge. Except for a handful of words, here and there, the author does not make these cross-cultural observations. Another parallel with minority families is that Mamaw, the author’s grandmother, was able to recognize a gem in the rough, despite her educational and social limitations: the gem is the author, himself. She nurtures him, because his parents couldn’t, even when she skewers him with unexpectedly obscene language, and helps him become somebody (a Yale lawyer and author!). This happens in minority communities too where someone discovers a child possessing enough internal fire to escape the ghetto, in this case, to flee the “hollers” of Kentucky. This book is an elegy to the author’s grandmother, most of all. Mamaw takes young Vance to live in Middletown, Ohio. On page 252 the author writes that he felt like a “cultural emigrant” in Ohio. He came to regard white middle-class people in Middletown as aliens and so the latter half of Hillbilly offers an account of his painful assimilation into White Middle-Class America. Blacks, who fled the South in the 1940s, landing in places like Detroit, felt something similar, just more extreme. Immigrants, Mexican or otherwise, know fully well what it feels to be a “cultural emigrant,” as I show in my own book, Becoming Mexican American: How Our Immigrant Family Survived to Pursue the American Dream. Hillbilly helps us understand less privileged white Americans to be sure. But, as I note, it is a study of poor people anywhere. And, for this reason it also contains cross-cultural implications of the kind I identify here that many emigrants from Appalachia might not relish.

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I read this book to understand why so many working class Americans voted for Trump. It really explains a lot the problems that middle to lower working class Americans face in our new America. How families can take care of each other as well as tear each other apart, making life for the kids growing up in these situations a total nightmare. JD Vance was lucky enough to have a Grandmother that cared deeply about him and helped him overcome several of the adversities he faced growing up in a very depressed economy. If you ever wondered why people will vote against their best interest, will deny a news story calling it Fake News, or why we have a drug epidemic...read this book...it really helped me understand a whole population of Americans that I have not encountered in my liberal life.