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

Author: J.D. Vance

Rating: ⭐ 4/5

Date Read: 2016/12/31

Pages: 264

I wanted so badly to love this. And I liked it, but I did not love it. This book was supposed to be the answer I needed to the question I keep asking myself: “WTF, America?” Because I’m still having trouble following the plot to the season, and possibly series, finale of my once-fine nation. And, while Hillbilly Elegy is a solid memoir, it’s not the book I wanted it to be.

NPR kept touting Hillbilly Elegy as an excellent explanatory book, bound to give readers insight into what happened in November. They oversold it. At its heart, Hillbilly Elegy is a memoir of a working class white kid. It’s an interesting memoir, which points out some pretty serious flaws in the way our country deals with the split between rural and urban, and the great class divide. The writing is competent, if a little uninspired, and Vance only interjects his political beliefs occasionally. We don’t necessarily agree politically, but he makes good points and I see where he’s coming from. We both agree that there are problems, but we have slightly different priorities when it comes to fixing them.

Are people really so out of touch that it comes as a surprise that life sucks for working class white people, that class and race are dissociable variables? Given my time at an elite, private graduate school, I’m inclined to say yes. I was consistently shocked by the wealth of others, not understanding how they could find the funds to jet off to Europe while I made pots of beans to tide me over until the next paycheck. Being prohibited from having a second job just made the gap between people who could count on their trust funds and those who had student loans breathing down their neck all the more apparent. My favorite section of Hillbilly Elegy was Vance’s depiction of how isolating graduate school can be, and how difficult it is to navigate an institution that feels fundamentally foreign. He had never met an Ivy League graduate before he went to law school, and I had never met one until I got to grad school. When I told my high school Spanish teacher I wanted to go to Stanford, she told me not to bother applying. She told me Stanford wasn’t for people like me.

Pet peeve: I wish people would stop using the phrase “California Elites.” We’ve got about 40 million people here, and we’re not all elites. Our poverty rate is 23.5%, according to a cursory glance at Wikipedia, which also relates that this is the highest in the country. I’ve walked the halls of a failing high school, watched kids die of opiate overdoses, come to view jail as something of a revolving door for people from my hometown. People escape towns with limited opportunity in California, just like they do in Appalachia. And, once we get into those rarefied circles (the ones where we know we don’t belong), we just want to pass. I get an advantage being from California, at least amongst people who aren’t actually from here. I describe a cute little mountain town, and people don’t immediately think meth. But that just puts more pressure on me to keep up the charade that my town was happy and suburban and filled with opportunities like everyone else’s. It’s exhausting.

Anyway, if you really are one of the so-called “coastal elites,” then maybe you should read this book. Maybe you should be aware that access to opportunities isn’t equal. Maybe you should know that some people come from less wealthy communities, and the advice we get (Go to state schools! Focus on sports so you can get a scholarship! Join the military to pay for college!) kind of varies from actual, good advice (take advantage of the generous scholarships given by elite universities, prioritize your classes and study for the SAT, and don’t join the military because the on-campus recruiter sold it as your only option). And maybe, just maybe, you’ll walk away understanding what millions of Americans are up against, and that will inspire you to try to make things change.