Hillbilly Elegy
J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy (2016) is memoir punctuated by social commentary. Thirty-something Vance tells his life story, which, no doubt, starts out like many kids who live amidst broken families and poverty in the American Midwest. Growing up in Ohio, the grandson of Kentucky hillbillies, Vance’s memoir becomes an elegy for all the Scots-Irish of Appalachia, all the hillbillies. While Vance’s childhood family life is far from stable and secure, he recognizes the important role his grandparents played in his life. In fact, he suggests it is the stability they provided that enabled him eventually graduate from Yale Law School, while many of his high school peers continue the generational battles with domestic and substance abuse, poverty, and unemployment. As its subtitle clearly states Hillbilly Elegy is “A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.”
I read Hillbilly Elegy last month thanks to the publisher sending me review copy at the same time as Netflix released the Hillbilly Elegy movie. While I haven’t yet watched the film, I recognized the timing was ideal for a renewed interest in this memoir and its subject. In the month of a contested presidential election which demonstrated the staunch cultural divisions in this country, Hillbilly Elegy certainly provided plenty of food for thought about the values, motives, and daily experiences of people living in the Rust Belt. There is no doubt, as Vance points out time and again, that the hillbillies feel left behind as industrial jobs that once hired entire Kentucky communities disappear and the culture of hillbilly toughness deteriorates any chance of upward mobility. Vance’s family memoir becomes a microcosm for the cultural crisis within which he grew up.
So much of Vance’s memoir is heartbreaking. His is the story of a boy whose mother descends deeper and deeper into substance abuse, dragging a line of men through his life, none of whom stick around for long. And yet, Vance couches his mother’s life in the domestic instability of her childhood. He sees that there is generation’s worth of trauma informing every hillbilly life. Yet Vance also recognizes that there are success stories in his family; his aunt, his uncle, and his sister all provide him with alternative visions of happy family lives.
Ultimately, Vance escapes the Rust Belt and hillbilly life cycle by joining the Marine Corps fresh out of high school. The Marines give Vance a family and a finishing school for life, as he prepares to go on to university and law school. In many ways Vance’s story of upward mobility is a Cinderella tale, and yet, Vance points out the discomfort of being an outsider at Yale. As he pursues professional success and a happy, stable home life, Vance is forced to grapple with the emotional scars left by his childhood. In other words, graduating from Yale Law School is not the endgame in Vance’s success story; he openly acknowledges that success is an ongoing process as he challenges himself to trust and communicate openly.
As Hillbilly Elegy concludes, Vance reflects on the ways he now works to provide uplift in the hillbilly culture of Rust Belt Ohio. What’s more, he weighs in on the policy questions about what can be done for this hillbilly culture in crisis. Like many memoirs of people who ascend the socioeconomic ladder, Hillbilly Elegy emphasizes the importance of education and a stable, loving relationship throughout childhood (even if that relationship was not a parental one). While Vance certainly recognizes the toxic elements of today’s hillbilly culture, he also proudly honors it, and perhaps his story can inspire other young men and women to break the generational crisis by choosing a different path.
A Few Great Passages:
“Still, I always distinguished ‘my address’ from ‘my home.’ My address was where I spent most of my time with my mother and sister, wherever that might be. But my home never changed: my great-grandmother’s house, in the holler, in Jackson, Kentucky” (11).
“I had spent so long just surviving my world, but now that I had a little space to observe it, I began to see the world as Mamaw did. I was scared, confused, angry, and heartbroken. I’d blame large businesses for closing up shop and moving overseas, and then I’d wonder if I might have done the same thing. I’d curse our government for not helping enough, and then I’d wonder if, in its attempts to help, it actually made the problem worse” (142).
“I had learned much about law at Yale. But I’d also learned that this new world would always seem a bit foreign to me, and that being a hillbilly meant sometimes not knowing the difference between love and war” (234).
Bibliography:
Vance, J. D., Hillbilly Elegy: The Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. Harper: New York, 2016.
