JD Vance‘s 2016 mid-life memoir Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis generated quite a bit of buzz when published, and it’s pretty easy to see why, as Vance’s account of his upbringing in rural poverty is a compelling read. Add the fact that Vance emerges (after transformative time in military service and at Yale) as a staunch social conservative, and the appeal of the book becomes even clearer.
The personal story is everything you would expect: heart-breaking and inspirational and full of characters that both fulfill and invalidate pre-existing stereotypes. As a primary example, the quasi-stable source of love and positive regard for him are his grandparents, especially his grandmother, who is a demanding, foul-mouthed, gun-toting, hyper-protective woman, capable of both tough and soft love as she sees fit, with tough love often involving believable threats of firearms.
Vance’s social analysis is predictable: he sees some of the ways in which government intervention could assist, but he never wavers from a demand that personal choice and individual responsibility are key elements: that is, improving schools is great, but if parents don’t care, what good can it do?
The problem, of course, is that the answer is, a lot, as it provides another venue for what Vance sees as crucial to healthy development: engaged, positive role models.
Vance also stays away from the concept of whiteness for the most part, neither wrestling with how it formed his community, nor with how it played to his advantage as he moved through the wider world. That’s fine–there is no ethical imperative for him to write about it–but it does sit at the center of the debate Hillbilly Elegy contributed to, and as such its overall omission is striking (he writes about being white; that’s a different thing the structure of whiteness).
Still, especially if you are curious about what rural poverty might look like in 21st century America, it’s a worthwhile read.
#WhatIWishICouldDo
Dunno. I read this because a friend wanted to. I have never been drawn to writing a memoir, and I don’t read a lot of this kind of non-fiction. I do think that Vance’s ability to create his family on the page is admirable: his relatives come through as fully realized, three dimensional people, and that keeps the book from sliding into a dry piece of social observation.
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