Hillbilly Elegy

For the film based on the book, see Hillbilly Elegy (film).

Hillbilly Elegy

Author	JD Vance
Language	English
Subject	Rural sociology, poverty, family drama
Published	June 2016 (Harper Press)
Publisher	Harper
Pages	264
Awards	2017 Audie Award for Nonfiction
ISBN	978-0-06-230054-6
OCLC	952097610
LC Class	HD8073.V37

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis is a 2016 memoir by JD Vance about the Appalachian values of his family from Kentucky and the socioeconomic problems of his hometown of Middletown, Ohio, where his mother's parents moved when they were young. It was adapted into the 2020 film Hillbilly Elegy, directed by Ron Howard and starring Glenn Close and Amy Adams.

Summary

Vance describes his upbringing and family background while growing up in Middletown, Ohio, where his mother and her family had moved after World War II from Breathitt County, Kentucky.

Vance states that their Appalachian culture valued traits such as loyalty and love of country despite family violence and verbal abuse. Vance recounts his grandparents' alcoholism as well as his mother's history of drug addictions and failed relationships. Vance's grandparents reconciled and became his guardians. His strict but loving grandmother pushed Vance, who went on to complete undergraduate studies at Ohio State University and earned a Juris Doctor degree from Yale Law School.

In his personal history, Vance raises questions about the responsibility of his family and local people for their misfortunes. Vance suggests that hillbilly culture fosters social disintegration and economic insecurity in Appalachia. He cites personal experiences: working as a grocery store cashier, Vance saw welfare recipients talking on cell phones, but he could not afford one.

Vance's antipathy toward those who seemed to profit from poor behavior while he struggled is presented as a rationale for Appalachia's political swing from voting Democratic to a strong Republican affiliation. Vance tells stories highlighting the lack of work ethic of the local people, including the story of a man who quit his job after expressing dislike over his work hours, as well as a co-worker with a pregnant girlfriend who would skip work unexcused.

Publication

In July 2016, Hillbilly Elegy was popularized by an interview with Vance in The American Conservative. The volume of requests briefly disabled the website. Halfway through August, The New York Times wrote that the title had remained in the top ten Amazon bestsellers since the interview's publication.

The publisher is a subsidiary of News Corp.

Vance has credited his Yale contract law professor Amy Chua as the "authorial godmother" of the book, as she persuaded him to write the memoir.

Reactions

Critical reception

The book reached the top of The New York Times best seller list in August 2016 and January 2017.

American Conservative contributor and blogger Rod Dreher expressed admiration for Hillbilly Elegy, saying that Vance "draws conclusions... that may be hard for some people to take. But Vance has earned the right to make those judgments. This was his life. He speaks with authority that has been extremely hard won." The following month, Dreher posted about his theories about why liberals loved the book. New York Post columnist and editor of Commentary John Podhoretz described the book as among the year's most provocative.

The book was positively received by conservatives such as National Review columnist Mona Charen and National Review editor and Slate columnist Reihan Salam. By contrast, other journalists criticized Vance for generalizing too much from his personal upbringing in suburban Ohio. Jared Yates Sexton of Salon criticized Vance for his "damaging rhetoric" and for endorsing policies used to "gut the poor". He argues that Vance "totally discounts the role racism played in the white working class's opposition to President Obama." Sarah Jones of The New Republic mocked Vance as "the false prophet of Blue America," dismissing him as "a flawed guide to this world" and the book as little more than "a list of myths about welfare queens repackaged as a primer on the white working class."

Historian Bob Hutton wrote in Jacobin that Vance's argument relied on circular logic and eugenics, ignored existing scholarship on Appalachian poverty, and was "primarily a work of self-congratulation." Sarah Smarsh with The Guardian noted that "most downtrodden whites are not conservative male Protestants from Appalachia" and called into question Vance's generalizations about the white working class from his personal upbringing.

The New York Times wrote that Vance's confrontation of a social taboo was admirable, regardless of whether the reader agreed with his conclusions. The newspaper wrote that Vance's subject is despair, and his argument was more generous in that it blames fatalism and learned helplessness rather than indolence.

A 2017 Brookings Institution report noted that "J. D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy became a national bestseller for its raw, emotional portrait of growing up in and eventually out of a poor rural community riddled by drug addiction and instability." Vance's account anecdotally confirmed the report's conclusion that family stability is essential to upward mobility.

The book provoked a response in the form of an anthology, Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy, edited by Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll. The essays in the volume criticize Vance for making broad generalizations and reproducing myths about poverty.

In an interview with Süddeutsche Zeitung in July 2023, German chancellor Olaf Scholz called the book "a very touching personal story of how a young man with poor starting conditions makes his way." Scholz said the book had moved him to tears, but that he found the positions Vance later took to be "tragic."

Relationship to Donald Trump

A key reason for Hillbilly Elegy's widespread popularity following its publication in 2016 was its role in explaining Donald Trump's rise to the top of the Republican Party. In particular, it purported to explain why white, working-class voters became attracted to Trump as a political leader. Vance himself offered commentary on how his book provides perspective on why a voter from the "hillbilly" demographic would support Trump.

Although he does not mention Trump in the book, Vance openly criticized the now-former president while discussing his memoir in interviews following its release. Vance walked these comments back when he joined the 2022 U.S. Senate race in Ohio, and later openly endorsed Trump. In July 2024, Vance was picked by Trump to be his running mate on the Republican ticket for the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

Renewed attention

In July 2024, a widely shared post on social media site Twitter falsely claimed that a passage in Hillbilly Elegy described Vance having sexual intercourse with a rubber glove secured between cushions on a couch. The posting of the joke came only hours after Vance had been announced as Trump's running mate for the 2024 American general election. The post read "can’t say for sure but he might be the first vp pick to have admitted in a ny times bestseller to fucking an inside-out latex glove shoved between two couch cushions (vance, hillbilly elegy, pp. 179-181).” with the fake citation apparently giving the comment credibility. The joke led to more jokes and a series of memes which proliferated at Vance's expense. The jokes and memes also found their way into more relevant criticism of Vance over his political positions related to women and sex. The flurry of controversies following his announcement as Trump's running mate led to speculation that he might be replaced. Jokes and memes based on the couch intercourse joke are shared both by those who believe them to be true and by people who found it amusing to play into the joke but understand that it does not have a factual basis, it can be hard to differentiate between the two. Experts cited a lack of content moderation on social media as one expanation for why the misinformation had gone so viral.

The Associated Press released a fact check titled "No, JD Vance did not have sex with a couch" on July 24, but later retracted it on July 25, as AP fact checks are only supposed to be of serious claims, not jokes on social media. The account @rickrudescalves was the first one to share the claim, with the author later claiming to have made the joke up themselves. The author believes that the claim was taken by many as believable because Vance has a “couch-fucker” vibe. The author claimed that he had never intended the piece as misinformation, and believed that the most signficant aspect of the whole thing was its exposure of voter naivety and gullibility. At a rally in Pennsylvania, when discussing upcoming vice presidential debate, Tim Walz joked that “I can’t wait to debate the guy... if he’s willing to get off the couch.” Political opponents of Vance's, including Walz, made light of the joke on the campaign trail. This brought criticism, as many of those same people had objected to unfounded and untrue claims being bandied about in the political campaign.

After Vance was announced as Trump's running mate in 2024, sales of the book and viewership for the film on Netflix increased dramatically. In July 2024, the book was censored in China on WeChat.

Sequel

In 2017, Vance signed a $8m deal to write a sequel to Hillbilly Elegy.

See also

• Political positions of JD Vance
• Unhumans
• Dawn's Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America

References

• William Allan Kritsonis, PhD – Founding Editor-in-Chief, National Forum Journals (Since 1982), Houston, TX

External links

• Official website
• C-SPAN Q&A interview with Vance on Hillbilly Elegy, October 23, 2016