Hillbilly Elegy

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

JD Vance gives a personal, insightful and shocking account of the lifestyle of the poor. He moved from the culture of dependence to the culture of the elite – from living among welfare queens to being a responsible provider himself. Bridging these two worlds, Vance has a unique vantage point from which to better see each culture.

A key theme: stable homes are crucial. When mom has a revolving door of boyfriends, the stress on the children is massive. Sister had to be his stand-in mom, and Grandma had to save him from that nightmare and give a sufficiently stable environment for him to even pass high school.

There’s a lot of strong language in the book, so I don’t recommend it for younger readers. There are also a couple of spots with intense adult themes. I can’t decide if these were gratuitous or necessary to depict the crazy life Vance lived. His greatest source of stability was also his main source of vulgarity, it seems. This exponentially ramped up the shock factor, for me.

It was interesting how the cultural dynamic crossed ethnic lines. Vance made passing reference to inner city lifestyles being similar to his hillbilly culture, and I also noticed some mafia themes. We police our own – hillbilly justice has its own flavor that doesn’t wait on local law enforcement.

The appeal of this book (New York times bestseller) seems to be in the author’s straddling of the political spectrum. He asserts both that the poor make bad choices that result in their poverty, and that they are disadvantaged by their environment – family history, upbringing, etc. This is not a contradiction, much less competing political interests, but just two factors piled on top of each other. It raises the old nature/nurture question. Could Vance have “made it” without Grandma giving him a stable environment? It appears not. He had to make different choices than his hillbilly family made, however fond he was of them. Vance calls himself a conservative, but there is a more liberal underpinning to his memoir: we cannot make good choices without the proper environment and structure to enable them.

Then again, I’m not sure this is exclusively liberal. It is the libertarian, secular conservative who asserts self-autonomy, not the social conservative. Where Hillary Clinton argued that “It Takes a Village,” Rick Santorum said “It Takes a Family.” Vance is somewhere in between, but it takes more than just you, for sure. Rush Limbaugh may argue that “It Takes Myself,” pulling me up by my bootstraps, but not many are buying that, I think. Maybe that’s the appeal of the book. Vance moderates each end of the political spectrum. Liberals need to face the dire consequences of awful personal choices. Conservatives need to face the real uphill climb of negative upbringing and the expectations that shape that reality.

The note of personal responsibility and pride in providing for others appealed to my conservative side. The revolution in his psyche when he came home as a Marine and could give his family things, instead of always need to take from them - that's key.

I don’t know that subjecting yourself to the repeated f-bombs and other junk that Vance deals out in spades is worth this book, to get the valuable lesson that we need to make unselfish choices in our work and family life. Read with caution.


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