What I’ve Been Reading . . . Hillbilly Elegy

This was my September read. I picked it because I loved the movie, and I was curious about what was true and what was made-up. Most of the movie matched up with the book, but the book took the reader on a longer journey from childhood to adulting.

The biggest difference, the scene where JD has to drive home from Yale to save his mother. She has nowhere to go; has relapsed on drugs. When he arrives, he spreads her bill across his credit cards. JD is a poor college kid who drove all night to get there. Then he turns around and drives back the next day. It’s dramatic, and I still remember that scene two years later.

The truth, JD already graduated. He’s married and living in Cincinnati. He drove an hour to Middletown because the cheap motel doesn’t accept credit cards over the phone. Then he drove home again. That’s flat, almost boring.

As a writer, I stretch true stories to make them fit the reader. Hollywood does the same in movies. That’s why I’m curious when movies are based on reality, what’s true, and what’s fictionalized.

The best part of this book – it’s part autobiography, part history of Appalachia and the rust belt. It also deals with groups and sociology. With the effects of poverty on him and the people around him.

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Part 2 – Hillbilly History: Meet Jed and Granny Clampett from the Beverly Hillbillies. It was a TV show that ran for eleven years when I was growing up. The Clampetts were from the Ozarks. J.D.’s family and mine were from the hills of Kentucky and Tennessee. They moved to Beverly Hills. The two of us, to Ohio.

​What we all have in common is the word ‘hillbilly,’ and how people look at that word. Hollywood and their writers think we’re all hicks from the sticks. OOPS, I mean poor people from rural mountain areas. That we’re not as educated, or as smart. We dress in old beat-up clothes and cling to God and our guns.
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Well yes, some of that’s true, but it’s also a stereotype. J.D.’s parents and my mother’s family left the hills for a better life up north. A lot of hillbillies did. He went to Middletown; my mom to Wapakoneta. Two of my aunts married and moved to Michigan in the 50’s. An uncle moved to Indiana. My family had our struggles, but nothing like J.D.’s And my two uncles who stayed, they had less opportunity, but over the years their families prospered too.  They’re some of my favorite people – with humor, kind-hearts, and common sense.

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                                                                                                             Part 3 – Autobiographies: J.D.’s story is unusual.      

​He went through a childhood of poverty, drugs, and abuse. Then onto the Marines, The Ohio State University, and Yale.  From there he became a ​successful lawyer, entrepreneur, and Senator. Now he’s the Vice President Elect. So how did he do it? His Superpower – his grandmother. She may have had the mouth of a sailor, but she believed in J.D. and pushed him to be his best.

My story is more common. I grew up working/middle class. I didn’t have any of J.D.’s struggles. I was a good student, did most things well. I graduated from OSU too, but I took a more ordinary path – teacher, wife, mother, now writer. Nothing extraordinary. J.D. only had his grandmother, but I had a whole family supporting and pushing me to be my best. The most influential – my father. He didn’t have to yell or spank me. He’d express disappointment. I’d be crushed and push to do better. 98% of the time I did. Thanks, Dad, and thanks to J.D.’s grandmother!
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Part 4 – Sociology: I never expected to read this autobiography and find examples that a sociologist could use to explain social behavior, relationships, or even interactions. But I did, and they’re fascinating! I picked a few examples to share, the ones that really resonated with me.

One of the first sections I picked was even footnoted. It said the “disturbing aspect of hillbillies was their racialness.” Huh?! When you read on, you discover hillbillies are white, the same ‘color’ as the powerful at local, state, and national levels. The odd thing, hillbillies share many of the same characteristics as southern blacks. That was written about the great migration north, after the depression. My relatives came during the 1950s. By the time J.D. was a kid, it still showed up in Sunday rehab sessions with his mother.
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Another example came from two books J.D. mentioned. Both of them were written by sociologists about black people in the inner city. The first, The Truly Disadvantaged by William Julius Wilson. It struck a nerve, and he almost wrote Wilson how it described Middletown. The second book, Losing Ground by Charles Murray. He wrote about how our government encourages “social decay through the welfare state.” He wasn’t writing about hillbillies, but it fit J.D.s family.

My family wouldn’t fit in with his, but we wouldn’t fit in with the families at Yale either. J.D. wrote about the interview process he went through before his second year. It’s called the Fall Interview Program. He described it as “a marathon week of dinners, cocktail hours, hospitality suite visits, and interviews.” That week wasn’t about grades or resumes. It was a social test – to see if you could belong, hold your own in the boardroom, and connect with future clients. Incredibly, knowing how to use eight pieces of silverware is important😊 J.D. said he learned about social capital then, how to tap into social networks and use them to succeed. That’s something I’m still learning. 


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Part 5 – Understanding Poverty: I didn’t grow up in poverty or in wealth either. I’m a middle-class kid, so some of the things J.D. wrote opened my eyes.
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He noted how state laws define families, but not in a good way. In hillbilly, black, and Hispanic families, relatives like grandparents, cousins, aunts, and uncles are important, but sometimes they’re overlooked in foster care placement. Imagine if J.D. lost contact with his grandma. I don’t think he’d have gotten to Yale, or become the vice president elect.

J.D. also wrote about payday lenders. I thought they were scum for taking advantage of poor people. But J.D. said they got him a three-day loan. He paid a few dollars in interest, instead of a HUGE overdraft fee. His moral, it shocked me . . . “Powerful people sometimes do things to help people like me (J.D.) without really understanding people like me.” Imagine my horror – thinking back on how I tried to help kids and did the opposite because I didn’t understand them, OUCH!

The final example came after J.D. graduated. He volunteered to adopt a needy kid for Christmas. I’ve done that so many times, and now I wonder how I did. Good intentions aren’t enough. J.D.s list included pajamas and a toy guitar. He didn’t buy either. Why not? Because poor people don’t wear PJs. They use jeans and underwear. As for the guitar, someone yelled at him to stop playing an electric keyboard. So what did J.D. buy? Some clothes, a fake cell phone, and fire trucks. Things he would have wanted as a kid.

I wish I could share more of Hillbilly Elegy. There’s so much wisdom in its pages. I recommend it, whether you’re Republican, Democrat, or an Independent. 

Amazon’s Description:  Hillbilly Elegy recounts J.D. Vance's powerful origin story... From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate now serving as a U.S. Senator from Ohio and the Republican Vice Presidential candidate for the 2024 election, an incisive account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America's white working class.

Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of white working-class Americans. The disintegration of this group, a process that has been slowly occurring now for more than forty years, has been reported with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck.

The Vance family story begins hopefully in postwar America. J. D.'s grandparents were "dirt poor and in love," and moved north from Kentucky's Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually one of their grandchildren would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of success in achieving generational upward mobility. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that J.D.'s grandparents, aunt, uncle, and, most of all, his mother struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, never fully escaping the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. With piercing honesty, Vance shows how he himself still carries around the demons of his chaotic family history.
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A deeply moving memoir, with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.

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