Abandoned by user

I’ve been meaning to read Hillbilly Elegy for a while, but I didn’t want to spend the $11.99 that they were charging on amazon. If I had caught it on sale for $1.99 or so, I probably would’ve bought it, but that never happened. It bubbled back to the top of my consciousness after reading that Ron Howard had bought the rights to create a Netflix series based on the memoir, and then yesterday when I was in the library, they had two copies on the shelves, so I grabbed it on a whim.

Vance’s memoir is highly readable – so much so that I read it without stopping in about three hours. I felt like he was brutally honest about the failings of his family, in a way that was compelling. I also found his perspective on the attitudes of the other members of the community interesting – especially the sense of male privilege that comes across in his pages. This book is full of men who mostly don’t work, who drink way too much, and who largely fail their families. Hashtag not all men, of course. His biological father, it turns out, was a pretty decent guy, even if loyalty to the hillbilly side of his family demanded that Vance align with them, the maternal line, over his dad.

There were also, though, things in the memoir that didn’t make sense at all. There’s one point in the book where he is talking about his mother and her third husband, Bob, and he throws out that they make over $100,000 a year.

In Preble County, with Mamaw and Papaw over forty-five minutes away, the fights turned into screaming matches. Often, the subject was money, though it made little sense for a rural Ohio family with a combined income of over a hundred thousand dollars to struggle with money.

This frankly baffled me, and it made the rest of the memoir a struggle for me. I live in Portland, Oregon, a place with a much higher cost of living than rural Ohio, and while I don’t plan to share my household income, suffice it to say that in 1994, when J.D. Vance was in second grade, I was a newly married, new lawyer and my household income was significantly under six figures. I would’ve said that these people were legitimately wealthy. I had my first child two years later and lived a modest, but secure, lifestyle with a house, two cars, and enough to eat. This made his entire thesis – that he’d grown up in hardscrabble poverty, difficult for me to swallow.

As an aside, it is also clear that his mother is a nurse, which is hardly a job that is held by people who are backwoods & uneducated. She is also a heroin addict. So, maybe it was all the unvarnished truth, but the facts don’t fit the conclusions, at least not in my mind. There was, for example, an entire discussion about how he and Mamaw couldn’t figure out how to fill out the FAFSA, and therefore he joined the Marines. It is a fact that he joined the Marines, but as I said above, his mother was a nurse. She had obviously gone to college, and possibly even graduate school. There is a small chance that this was the first time Mamaw had seen a FAFSA, but, on the other hand, she had likely filled one out for her daughter to attend college.

I was frustrated because he grew up in what was basically an extremely abusive family, and was attempting to generalize his abuse as something that was cultural, not endemic to his fucked-up, character-challenged, self-indulgent, mother and the people with whom she associated. Based on his anecdotes, his family was obnoxious, abusive and flat-out mean to their neighbors, local business owners, and partners. I didn’t actually find Mamaw charming at all – she was mouthy, unpleasant, and violent. The author tells a story about his grandparents basically vandalizing a local toy store because they were angry that the owner had asked their unattended son to leave before he broke something (Vance’s uncle). Their response to this insult was so over the top that I struggled to believe it – and if it’s true, they should’ve been arrested. I understand his love for her, because she raised the author at the time that he needed her most. I get his perspective, but from the outside looking in, none of this is good for kids. With exceptions outside of his family, the behavior exhibited by the so-called adults in this memoir was childish, emotionally-dysregulated and often anti-social.

I did enjoy his brief discussion of ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences) and how toxic stress changes a child’s brain chemistry permanently. I do not dispute that J.D. Vance grew up in an abusive family, nor do I dispute that he is a remarkably resilient young man who very much overcame a difficult childhood. But I simply cannot believe that all of the “hillbillies” in Kentucky behave like this. Maybe they do, but seriously, these people were a modern incarnation of the Ewell family from To Kill A Mockingbird. They felt like caricatures created to fit a narrative. And if this is how they all act, then they universally need to grow the ever-loving-fuck up. And if they don’t behave like this, then trying to make this a “Memoir” of a culture, and not just a family, is both unfair and deeply misleading.

Especially given that Vance was two generations removed from Appalachian. His grandparents, Mamaw and Papaw, who feature so prominently in the book, fled Kentucky as teens, heading to the more industrial Ohio in order to find a better future. Vance’s mother, as I pointed out above, was a college graduate and a nurse. Vance himself visited family in Kentucky, but he did not live there and he did not attend school there. So, for him to write a book that purports to explain what is happening in Appalachia feels extremely arrogant, given that he is an outsider. Not as much of an outsider as a journalist from the New York Times or Washington Post would be, to be sure, but an outsider nonetheless.

So then, we come to the narrative – J.D. Vance is a conservative Republican. Hillbilly Elegy walked a contradictory line: he wanted, on the one hand, to present his family as sort of noble savages who were doomed by their community and their circumstances, forgotten and left behind by American progress (which is the preferred narrative to explain how Trump got elected), and, on the other hand, he wanted to support the premise that what the community really needs is less government help and more “up by their bootstraps” attitude (an attitude, which, btw, they seem to think that they alone already possess, given their attitude towards the social safety net being available to anyone who isn’t a rural white). These two positions seem difficult to reconcile at best and completely inconsistent at worst. It’s impossible to have it both ways – either this is a culture unmoored from ethics and productivity and they are responsible for their own shortcomings, or it is a culture that is suffering because of structural failures in our socio-economic system. It simply cannot be both, no matter how much conservative dogma aligned with rural whiteness wants to make it so.

TLDR: I enjoyed reading it, but it convinced me of nothing.