Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

JD Vance

Hillbilly Elegy won the #1 New York Times Bestseller designation. From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate now serving as the Vice President of the United States, 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. This bestselling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of white working-class Americans in the Rust Belt. 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, offering a searing inside look at poverty in America. The Vance family story, a powerful example of the struggle for social mobility, 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, addiction, poverty, and family 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. A deeply moving story about Appalachian culture, 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.