Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance
(Format used for this read: Audiobook)
I finished this a couple days ago and haven’t reviewed it here yet because I needed time to process how I felt about it and how to express it.
Here is the thing:
I didn’t like it.
Here is a quick synopsis of what it’s about before I go into my thoughts:
“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, sister, 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.
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.”
I have had this book recommended to me by several people so I was intrigued.
And when the book started off I found it to be an interesting peek inside a heartbreaking childhood that was filled with abuse and struggle but also much love.
But as he spoke of growing older and the experiences he had, I grew to dislike the way he spoke of “his people” as he said.
I thought it was condescending in a way.
He overcame many difficulties, worked extremely hard and made it to college and then Yale law school…proud he had “escaped” the life he knew.
I kept waiting to hear him tell of how now he is doing things to help the type of community he grew up in…
things he is involved in to make changes….how he is using his education and past to pour into people in hard circumstances that he is so familiar with…
but it never came.
He basically said that ”they”created their own problems and it’s up to “them”
to fix them…no systemic policies or changes or education will help.
He repeated many times how underprivileged and out of place he was at an Ivy League school and I kept thinking….you may have been poor and had horrible circumstances growing up…that is certainly true..
but to think you have no privilege at all just is incorrect…
you’re still WHITE and MALE and in this country that automatically puts you a couple steps (Or really a BUNCH of steps) ahead, regardless of your economic or geographical background.
I don’t know y’all…
There are more thoughts swirling in my head about this book…
But that’s all I gotta say right now.
Needless to say…
I wasn’t a fan. 👎