Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of Family and Culture in Crisis by J. D. Vance

For those of us still puzzling over the recent presidential election, this memoir is reputed to provide some insight and understanding. Published in June 1916, it was clearly not intended as an explanation of that election. But many pundits have decided to regard it in just that light. J.D. Vance, a self-described hillbilly, grew up mostly in Middletown, Ohio. I say "mostly" because his family and he maintained very close connections with their home town and home culture in the hills and hollers of Kentucky.

Vance writes with grace about his growing up with a drug-addicted mother who went through a series of men as partners/husbands, none of whom managed to be a father to young J. D. The family found itself in a small industrial city in Ohio because J. D.'s grandfather was recruited from Kentucky to work in an industrial plant. So were a lot of their friends and neighbors.

According to Vance, that is how many burgeoning industries throughout the Midwest and western Pennsylvania populated their factories. The result was a wholesale transplanting northward of hillbilly culture from the hills of Appalachia. While those industries thrived, the transplanted population thrived also-bought nice homes, purchased good cars, enjoyed vacations in their Appalachian homeland. And they clung to their culture, which Vance tells us was and is centered fiercely on the family, with an equally fierce patriotism and some propensity for violence, and a disdain for education.

Consequently the hollowing out of the industrial belt, turning it into the Rust Belt, left the hillbilly families unable to cope, with family instability and drugs filling the void.

Vance himself survived his addicted mother, who went through a series of men, offering Vance little nurturing and no role model. He was raised and saved by Mawmaw, his smart, gun-toting, tough-minded, foul-mouthed, caring grandmother, who insisted, against the values of her hillbilly culture, that he go to college. An enlistment in the Marines instilled a sense of purpose and discipline: then Vance attended first Ohio State University, then Yale Law School. He made it out of the economic and cultural trap of unemployment, drugs, social instability.

Many of Vance's readers believe that the anger experienced by the hillbillies left behind by the economy and the mainstream culture is what powered the rejection that surfaced in the recent election. Vance clearly loves his hillbilly culture even as he details some of its toxicity. I am not sure how much Hillbilly Culture explains the recent election. I am sure that it succeeds beautifully in sympathetically delineating a group of Americans who are hurting and angry. recommend the book.