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A 2016 memoir, 'Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis' by J.D. Vance, has gained popularity again as people across the country await its upcoming Netflix adaptation. The memoir recounts Vance's life growing up with his Kentucky family in Ohio; tackling his experience with poverty to observations of addiction in Appalachia.

• Hillbilly Elegy Goodreads
• Hillbilly Elegy Goodreads Quotes

• Vance's memoir, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, bears witness to the hollowing-out of the American dream, close up and personal. His book will vaccinate you against the idea that whiteness per se is a winning lottery ticket, and it will help you see the people of all races who are struggling in the hollowed-out towns of the Rust Belt.
• A 2017 Brookings Institution report noted that, “JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy became a national bestseller for its raw, emotional portrait of growing up in and eventually out of a poor rural community riddled by drug addiction and instability.'
• Hillbilly Elegy. 2020 R 1h 57m Dramas. An urgent phone call pulls a Yale Law student back to his Ohio hometown, where he reflects on three generations of family history and his own future. Starring: Amy Adams, Glenn Close, Gabriel Basso.

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis is a 2016 memoir by J. D. Vance about the Appalachian values of his Kentucky family and their relation to the social problems of his hometown of Middletown, Ohio, where his mother's parents moved when they were young.

Summary[edit]

Vance describes his upbringing and family background while growing up in the city of Middletown, Ohio, the third largest city in the Cincinnati metropolitan area. He writes about a family history of poverty and low-paying, physical jobs that have since disappeared or worsened in their guarantees, and compares this life with his perspective after leaving it.

Though Vance was raised in Middletown, his mother and her family were from Breathitt County, Kentucky. Their Appalachian values include traits like loyalty and love of country, despite social issues including violence and verbal abuse. He recounts his grandparents' alcoholism and abuse, and his unstable mother's history of drug addictions and failed relationships. Vance's grandparents eventually reconciled and became his de facto guardians. He was pushed by his tough but loving grandmother, and eventually Vance was able to leave Middletown to attend Ohio State University and Yale Law School.^[1]

Alongside his personal history, Vance raises questions such as the responsibility of his family and people for their own misfortune. Vance blames hillbilly culture and its supposed encouragement of social rot. Comparatively, he feels that economic insecurity plays a much lesser role. To lend credence to his argument, Vance regularly relies on personal experience. As a grocery store checkout cashier, he watched welfare recipients talk on cell phones although the working Vance could not afford one. His resentment of those who seemed to profit from poor behavior while he struggled, especially combined with his values of personal responsibility and tough love, is presented as a microcosm of the reason for Appalachia's overall political swing from strong Democratic Party to strong Republican affiliations. Likewise, he recounts stories intended to showcase a lack of work ethic including the story of a man who quit after expressing dislike over his job's hours and posted to social media about the 'Obama economy', as well as a co-worker, with a pregnant girlfriend, who would skip work.^[1]

Publication[edit]

The book was popularized by an interview with the author published by The American Conservative in late July 2016. The volume of requests briefly disabled the website. Halfway through the next month, The New York Times wrote that the title had remained in the top ten Amazon bestsellers since the interview's publication.^[1]

Vance credits his Yale contract law professor Amy Chua as the 'authorial godmother' of the book.^[2]

Reception[edit]

The book reached the top of The New York Times Best Seller list in August 2016^[3] and January 2017.^[4] Many journalists criticized Vance for generalizing too much from his personal upbringing in suburban Ohio.^[5][6][7][8]

American Conservative contributor and blogger Rod Dreher expressed admiration for Hillbilly Elegy, saying that Vance 'draws conclusions…that may be hard for some people to take. But Vance has earned the right to make those judgments. This was his life. He speaks with authority that has been extremely hard won.'^[9] The following month, Dreher posted about why liberals loved the book.^[10]New York Post columnist and editor of CommentaryJohn Podhoretz described the book as among the year's most provocative.^[11] The book was positively received by conservatives such as National Review columnist Mona Charen^[12] and National Review editor and Slate columnist Reihan Salam.^[13]

By contrast, Jared Yates Sexton of Salon criticized Vance for his 'damaging rhetoric' and for endorsing policies used to 'gut the poor.' He argues that Vance 'totally discounts the role racism played in the white working class's opposition to President Obama.'^[14] Sarah Jones of The New Republic mocked Vance as 'the false prophet of Blue America,' dismissing him as 'a flawed guide to this world' and the book as little more than 'a list of myths about welfare queens repackaged as a primer on the white working class.'^[6]The New York Times wrote that Vance's direct confrontation of a social taboo is admirable regardless of whether the reader agrees with his conclusions. The newspaper writes that Vance's subject is despair, and his argument is more generous in that it blames fatalism and learned helplessness rather than indolence.^[1] Bob Hutton of Jacobin wrote that Vance's argument relied on circular logic, ignored existing scholarship on Appalachian poverty, and was 'primarily a work of self-congratulation.'^[5]Sarah Smarsh with The Guardian noted that 'most downtrodden whites are not conservative male Protestants from Appalachia' and called into question Vance's generalizations about the white working class from his personal upbringing.^[7]

A 2017 Brookings Institution report noted that, “JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy became a national bestseller for its raw, emotional portrait of growing up in and eventually out of a poor rural community riddled by drug addiction and instability.' Vance's account anecdotally confirmed the report's conclusion that family stability is essential to upward mobility.^[15] The book provoked a response in the form of an anthology, Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy, edited by Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll. The essays in the volume criticize Vance for making broad generalizations and reproducing myths about poverty.^[8]

Film adaptation[edit]

A film adaptation was released in select theaters in the United States on November 11, 2020, then digitally on Netflix on November 24. It was directed by Ron Howard and stars Glenn Close, Amy Adams, Gabriel Basso^[16][17] and Haley Bennett. Although a few days of filming were planned for the book's setting of Middletown, Ohio,^[18] much of the filming in the summer of 2019 was in Atlanta, Clayton and Macon, Georgia, using the code name 'IVAN.'^[19][20]

References[edit]

1. ^ ^abcdSenior, Jennifer (August 10, 2016). 'Review: In 'Hillbilly Elegy,' a Tough Love Analysis of the Poor Who Back Trump'. The New York Times. Archived from the original on October 11, 2016. Retrieved October 11, 2016.
2. ^Heller, Karen (February 6, 2017). ''Hillbilly Elegy' made J.D. Vance the voice of the Rust Belt. But does he want that job?'. The Washington Post. Archived from the original on November 25, 2020. Retrieved March 13, 2017.
3. ^Barro, Josh (August 22, 2016). 'The new memoir 'Hillbilly Elegy' highlights the core social-policy question of our time'. Business Insider. Archived from the original on February 13, 2017. Retrieved March 13, 2017.
4. ^'Combined Print & E-Book Nonfiction Books – Best Sellers – January 22, 2017'. The New York Times. Archived from the original on January 27, 2017. Retrieved February 12, 2017.
5. ^ ^ab'Hillbilly Elitism'. jacobinmag.com. Archived from the original on May 7, 2020. Retrieved April 2, 2020.
6. ^ ^abJones, Sarah (November 17, 2016). 'J.D. Vance, the False Prophet of Blue America'. The New Republic. Archived from the original on March 17, 2017. Retrieved March 22, 2017.
7. ^ ^abSmarsh, Sarah (October 13, 2016). 'Dangerous idiots: how the liberal media elite failed working-class Americans'. The Guardian. ISSN0261-3077. Archived from the original on April 18, 2020. Retrieved April 19, 2020.
8. ^ ^abGarner, Dwight (February 25, 2019). ''Hillbilly Elegy' Had Strong Opinions About Appalachians. Now, Appalachians Return the Favor'. The New York Times. ISSN0362-4331. Archived from the original on February 21, 2020. Retrieved April 2, 2020.
9. ^Dreher, Rod (July 11, 2016). 'Hillbilly America: Do White Lives Matter?'. The American Conservative. Archived from the original on March 22, 2017. Retrieved March 22, 2017.
10. ^Dreher, Rod (August 5, 2016). 'Why Liberals Love 'Hillbilly Elegy''. The American Conservative. Archived from the original on October 12, 2016. Retrieved March 22, 2017.
11. ^Podhoretz, John (October 16, 2016). 'The Truly Forgotten Republican Voter'. Commentary. Archived from the original on February 25, 2017. Retrieved March 12, 2017.
12. ^'Hillbilly Elegy: J.D. Vance's New Book Reveals Much about Trump & America'. National Review. July 28, 2016. Archived from the original on March 18, 2017. Retrieved March 22, 2017.
13. ^'Reihan Salam on Twitter: 'Very excited for @JDVance1. HILLBILLY ELEGY is excellent, and it'll be published in late June:''. Twitter. April 30, 2016. Archived from the original on April 17, 2017. Retrieved March 22, 2017.
14. ^Jared Yates Sexton (March 11, 2017). 'Hillbilly sellout: The politics of J. D. Vance's 'Hillbilly Elegy' are already being used to gut the working poor'. Salon. Archived from the original on March 18, 2017. Retrieved March 22, 2017.
15. ^Eleanor Krause and Richard V. Reeves (2017) Rural Dreams: Upward Mobility in America's Countryside, pp.12–13. Brookings Institution. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/es_20170905_ruralmobility.pdfArchived December 6, 2020, at the Wayback Machine
16. ^Williams, Trey (April 12, 2019). Close%5d%5d plays a strong matriarch, Mamaw, who saves the hero./ 'Ron Howard-Directed 'Hillbilly Elegy' Casts Gabriel Basso in Lead Role' Check |url= value (help). TheWrap. Archived from the original on May 13, 2019. Retrieved July 5, 2019.
17. ^WKRC (April 16, 2019). ''Hillbilly Elegy' expected to be filmed locally; more cast members sign on'. Local 12/WKRC-TV. Archived from the original on April 17, 2019. Retrieved July 5, 2019.
18. ^Kiesewetter, John (June 3, 2019). 'Glenn Close, Amy Adams, Visit Middletown For 'Hillbilly Elegy' Meeting'. WVXU Cincinnati Public Radio. Archived from the original on June 7, 2019.
19. ^Walljasper, Matt (June 27, 2019). 'What's filming in Atlanta now? Lovecraft Country, The Conjuring 3, Waldo, Hillbilly Elegy, and more'. Atlanta Magazine. Archived from the original on June 28, 2019. Retrieved July 5, 2019.
20. ^Chandler, Tom (July 3, 2019). 'Netflix to begin filming movie 'Ivan' in Macon'. The Georgia Sun. Archived from the original on July 5, 2019. Retrieved July 5, 2019.

External links[edit]

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Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis is a recent memoir from J.D. Vance, a man who grew up in Jackson, Kentucky and then Middletown, Ohio. He escaped these towns where manufacturing was declining, schools were failing, and families were falling apart—first as a Marine, then as a summa cum laude graduate of The Ohio State University, before landing at Yale Law School. Hillbilly Elegy paints itself as Vance’s look back at how the Rust Belt and Appalachia got to where they are now, as told through his personal life examples. What is not quite so clear up front is that Hillbilly Elegy is also, at least partly, a political screed.

In hindsight, Hillbilly Elegy is one of those books I probably should have abandoned early on, as not for me.

Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing
While I don’t have enough of a catalog on here yet for this to be clear, memoir is one of my favorite genres. I love a well-done memoir that introduces me to a world completely outside of my own so I approached Hillbilly Elegy with anticipation. I had heard Hillbilly Elegy touted on NPR in an interview with Vance shortly after the shock of Tuesday, November 8, 2016, and seen it in a variety of magazines as a book to read to explain how such a large group of people can have seemingly voted against their interests (#healthcare). I had read The Glass Castle several years ago and was expecting something at least somewhat similar but on a larger scale than a single family. This is not what I got.

My biggest problem with Hillbilly Elegy is that I have never, to my best recollection, read a memoir so politically biased. This is not to say that it is directly political—I have read memoirs of politicians. Rather, from the selection of stories to the conclusions Vance then draws from them, I had the distinct impression through many of the chapters that I was, quite literally, listening to Repubican propaganda rather than a memoir. Two of the starkest examples for me were Vance’s attempts to convince his reader of the evils of public benefits, like food stamps, and that much of Appalachia’s rejection of President Obama has nothing to do with race.

Don’t Look Behind the Curtain
Ironically, in his structure of these arguments, Vance falls victim to his own logical fallacies. He argues that it is short-sighted and too simple to say that the rejection of Obama can be boiled down to race while simultaneously telling his reader two stories about food stamps—that he saw people at the grocery store he worked in as a teenager selling them to buy some beer and that his drug-addicted, unemployed neighbor used them to buy steaks—to convince us that public benefits like food stamps are a problem and should be done away with. We should not draw wholesale conclusions about all of Appalachia when a handful of people are calling the President the N-word but we should conclude the welfare state with its “Welfare Queens” (a phrase used earnestly by Vance when discussing a woman who “shockingly” had all her children by the same man) should be done away with based on two recollections of a teenage grocery bagger.

I found myself gobsmacked listening to his description of Obama as having, essentially, moved past any hardship in his life.

Many of my new friends blame racism for this perception of the president [Obama]. But the president feels like an alien to many [people in the town he grew up in] for reasons that have nothing to do with skin color. Recall that not a single one of my high school classmates attended an Ivy League school. Barack Obama attended two of them and excelled at both. He is brilliant, wealthy, and speaks like a constitutional law professor, which of course he is. Nothing about him bears any resemblance to the people I admired growing up. His accent—clean, perfect, neutral—is foreign. His credentials are so impressive that they are frightening. He made his life in Chicago, a dense metropolis, and he conducts himself with a confidence that comes from knowing that the modern American meritocracy was built for him. Of course, Obama overcame adversity in his own right—adversity familiar to many of us—but that was long before any of us knew him.

Hillbilly Elegy Goodreads

Interestingly, George W. Bush meets most of these descriptors, yet was not rejected by Appalachia by any stretch.* Our 43^rd president attended Yale for undergraduate and Harvard business school. He is also rich, having had family money and worked in the Texas oil industry—he was once co-owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team. While Bush’s early years were spent in Midland (I’ve been there—NOT a large town)—he then attended private school in Houston for two years before attending boarding school in Amherst, Massachusetts for high school. The only significant difference in the description Vance paints of Obama and the reality of W. is how they speak.

My point in this is not that Appalachia is a bed of racists (though, certainly, there are some there as there are anywhere—it’s naïve to suggest race had nothing to do with the perceptions of Obama). Rather, Vance is the master of selection—picking and choosing facts that fit his narrative and constructing fairly convincing arguments to match his points based on the selective narrative he provided as the set-up. Vance is so earnest, so seemingly trustworthy, it’s easy to see why this book is being considered authoritative.

The tone in several places is also concerning. In telling stories about someone who was perceived to be homosexual, Vance described the person was a “pervert.” The context is Vance quoting another person but the word is said repeatedly and with such vehemence in the audiobook, it left me fairly convinced that, despite hiding behind another person’s alleged quote, this may be spot-on for how Vance feels. If he doesn’t, he should perhaps re-word that section in future editions.

Defining the Elite
He talks about “they” and “them” when he refers to people that his hometown would consider “elites” though the book conveniently leaves out that, after graduating from Yale, Vance went to work for Sidley Austin LLP and now works for a venture capital and private equity firm in San Francisco associated with Peter Thiel (founder of a small company called PayPal). As an attorney, I can assert with confidence that he was making six figures at Sidley Austin and is certainly not making less working for Mithril Capital Management LLC now. For all of his “them”-ing, Vance looks a lot like the thems now.

It’s Not ALL Bad
The book is not entirely without redeeming points. The only parts I would ever listen to again were close together in Chapters 13 and 14. In Chapter 13 he makes several points about social capital—how doors are already opened to some, cracked for others, and almost altogether locked for a third group, unless someone like a mentor or caring professor will open the door for you. Similarly Chapter 14’s discussion of trauma in kids is worth reading, particularly in light of the abuse Vance survived. Neither of these sections is perfect and there are certainly better sources for the material; however, it felt unfair to rip the book so harshly without at least acknowledging that a few points here and there landed. I’m sure many of the points he makes about the loss of manufacturing jobs and the opiod crisis are also also accurate; I was just having a hard time not getting distracted by all the bias to appreciate them.

In Sum
Vance’s life is his life—I have no reason to doubt that the stories in Hillbilly Elegy happened to him in the way he said. And this book almost certainly reflects the way a lot of people in Appalachia and the Rust Belt feel about the economy and the government that has seemingly (and in many cases, actually) abandoned them. My problem is the agenda. If Vance wants to write a book of political essays, he should. If he wants to write a memoir, he should. Blending these genres in Hillbilly Elegy in such a way that it felt like he was directly trying to hide his agenda ultimately felt so dishonest that I would never recommend this book to anyone.

Hillbilly Elegy Goodreads Quotes

*In both the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, George W. Bush took Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Virginia, in addition to the rest of the states typically considered to be the South.

Notes:
Published: June 28, 2016 by HarperCollins (@harpercollinsus)
Author: J.D. Vance (Twitter: @JDVance1)
Date Read: July 18, 2017
Rating: 1 star

Excellent sources of more nuanced and educated criticism than mine can be found here:

Hillbilly Ethnography by John Thomason
J.D. Vance, The False Prophet of Blue America by Sarah Jones
For the Good of the Poor and Common People: What Hillbilly Elegy Gets Wrong About Appalachia and the Working Class by Elizabeth Catte