by Pat Rooney
Is your children’s life going to be better than yours? Most people would say yes. In J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, he makes the case that in parts of the country that’s not necessarily so. Referring mostly to Appalachian and the Ohio River rust belt, Mr. Vance gives us his life story growing up in these places. It is a tale of object poverty, disfunction, broken families, hillbillies all. And yet it is also full of family love, compassion and loyalty. And in J.D.’s life, that made a difference.
Despite the subject matter, it is foremost not a tale of woe. As Mr. Vance says in his introduction, “if I leave you with the impression that there are bad people in my life, I am sorry for there are no villains in this story, just a rag tag band of hillbillies struggling to find their way.”
The book starts with Mr. Vance’s family beginnings in the Appalachian Hills of Eastern Kentucky. His immediate family migrated to rural Ohio but really never left Appalachia, going back often to see their kin. Despite broken families and family disfunction, family ties were the most important thing to keep. Thanks to his mother’s anger issues and frequent drug use, J.D. moves around a lot between his mother’s home, and current husband, and his “Mamaw and Papaw’s.” In fact, the strong influence of his grandparents was crucial to his successful upbringing.
In the book, J.D. offers some insight to the poverty of Appalachia and the rust belt. With the decline in coal mining and heavy manufacturing in the area, many good jobs have left this part of the country. The people that have remained are mostly unemployed, underemployed and impoverished. They are divorcing more, marrying less and experiencing much less happiness. He notes that the general thinking amongst most people is that the prospects of working-class people has declined due to fewer jobs and that only if they had better access to good jobs then the other parts of their lives would improve, as well. But J.D. is not so sure, saying “I once held that opinion myself,” believing that “not having a job is stressful and not having enough money is even more so.” He shares a story of a warehouse company that could not find steady workers despite decent wages. The warehouse was always making do with temporary help because few workers would stay on the job. And if they did, they would be chronically late and absent. When fired, J.D. recalls these employees would play the victim and typically lash out and blame the company for their dismissal.
Another aspect of the book that struck me is similarities with other rural parts of the country, like Oklahoma. Many of the same “Scotch-Irish” settlers who settled in Appalachia also migrated to other southern states, like Oklahoma, where land was cheap and available. J.D. alludes to this when he talks about the “hillbillies in Louisiana and Alabama memorialized in Hank Williams’ famous rural white anthem “A Country Boy Can Survive.”
These themes of poverty, country living and family loyalty, coupled with disfunction and drug use, run throughout rural America. Growing up in Eastern Oklahoma I could remember seeing a number of them myself. That we are doing better as a state is remarkable but a story for another day. Hillbilly Elegy is as important now as it was when it was published in 2016. A great read and highly recommended.
I’ve read it twice and saw the movie. It is quite a story and I laughed out loud many times while reading it. You just can’t make this story up.
Thanks Pat. I need to read the book and see the movie.