Hillbilly Elegy

Originally published in the Ketchikan Daily News, November 2016; written by Tammy Dinsmore

For the past seventeen weeks, “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis” by J.D. Vance has been on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list. I read it back in September and I’ve been picking it up from time to time ever since.

Growing up in a very dysfunctional family, Mr. Vance was raised mainly by his grandparents, “Mamaw” and “Papaw” in Middletown, Ohio. Middletown was a town with a thriving manufacturing industry just after World War II, and that’s when his grandparents moved there from Jackson, Kentucky, a very poor, rural area of Kentucky. Moving from Kentucky to Ohio meant jobs and a better way of life for them, and they succeeded in becoming part of the middle class, but really had a hard time with their new status. By the mid-1970s and early 1980s jobs were starting to disappear in Middletown and the Vance family found themselves in the same situation as Mamaw and Papaw had been in in Kentucky.

Physical abuse, drug and alcohol addiction was “normal” in the Vance family. When he was living with his mother and sister, there was often not enough to eat, they had to move a lot, and there seemed to be a revolving door of men in their lives, some good, some not.

While living with his grandparents, they would often make the trip back to Jackson and it was there that he saw more of the poverty and loss of hope that many endured in that rural area. He doesn’t gloss things over. He talks about the Hillbilly’s fierce love and loyalty to one another, their disdain for outsiders, but at the same time he says it’s their lack of ambition that keeps them there, unwilling to move to find work, angry at the government for the loss of jobs but at the same time, wanting the government to help them out.

His grandparents kept at him about staying in school and he did, and graduated high school. He also knew it would be bad for him if he stayed in his hometown so he decided to join the Marine Corp. After his tour of duty, he was able to attend college by working and with help from the GI Bill and from there, went on to graduate from Yale Law School.

This is an interesting read with a new perspective on some of the people who live in what they call the “rust belt” and the Appalachian Mountain regions of the United States.