Hillbilly Elegy

    I'd heard about Hillbilly Elegy by J. D. Vance in passing many times, but it never really caught my attention. Somewhat recently, I listened to a discussion about it on a literary podcast with a strong liberal bias, which made me curious enough to push it up the nearly endless reading list.

    Filtered through the podcasts biases, this wasn't to be a particularly insightful book. I expected a fairly run-of-the-mill rags to riches story, but that isn't quite what it is. While there is plenty of that, it's a pretty blatant American Dream. Vance's story is fairly troubled, stemming from an unstable childhood of poverty, a drug-addicted mother, and the series of boyfriends that she brought into their life. In the end he's a graduate of Yale Law School. So definitely bootstraps.

    However, I chose to focus on his stories about his grandma. Without her stern guidance, Vance seems unlikely to have succeeded. Tough love can be the best motivator that one can imagine. Another interesting theme is class in society. Now this is a potentially controversial one, occasionally veering into a slightly rude critique of white poverty in the South and Midwest. The discussions about the role of religion in society, though, were pretty interesting, particularly since the previously aforementioned areas also make up the Bible Belt, a more fervently religious part of the United States. It's not a criticism. Religion is important to them. But there is a distinction between Church and Faith, one showing the divergence of belief and organized religion. 

    It's not as controversial as I expected, while not reaching drastically new insights. The overall lifestyle and circumstances are described well an illustrate an American subculture that might not be well known to most US citizens, especially some of the struggles they face, which are unfamiliar from my privileged upbringing. It 's worth a read, so I'll give it a recommendation, but a slightly hesitant one, since this general self-made man story does exist in many works.