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

A passionate and intimate examination of the culture of white working-class Americans in crisis, Hillbilly Elegy is. Although reports of this group's dissolution, which has been happening gradually for more than 40 years, are becoming more frequent and alarming, nothing has ever been written about it as brutally from the inside out as this has. In his real narrative, J. D. Vance describes what it's like to be born with a social, regional, and class decline around your neck.

Hopefully, the narrative of the Vance family starts in wartime America. J. D.'s grandparents, who were described as "dirt poor and in love," relocated from Kentucky's Appalachian area to Ohio's north in an attempt to escape the abhorrent poverty that surrounded them. They brought up a middle-class family, and one of their grandkids would go on to graduate from Yale Law School, a traditional measure of success for accomplishing upward mobility across generations. However, as the story of J.D.'s family unfolds in Hillbilly Elegy, we discover that his mother, aunt, uncle, sister, and grandparents all struggled mightily to meet the expectations of their new middle-class lifestyle and were never able to fully escape the history of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma that was so typical of their region of the country. Vance reveals, with cutting candour, how he still battles the ghosts of his turbulent familial past.

Hillbilly Elegy is a very poignant book that captures the essence of what it's truly like to go up the social ladder via humour and vibrantly coloured characters. It is also a sobering and urgent reflection on how much of our nation has lost sight of the American ideal.