I recently read Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance. I wanted to stop about a quarter of the way through, because simply put, it's just not a good book. It's a good memoir: but as a purported sociological study, it's terrible.
A big part of what never sat right is that while J.D. Vance can certainly self-identify as a "hillbilly" if he wants, it consistently rings untrue.
He writes at length about Jackson, Kentucky, but throughout the book really only goes there for funerals. He grew up in Middletown, Ohio, and while Butler County and Warren County, Ohio, are most certainly the Rust Belt, they aren't Appalachia. Vance himself acknowledges this late in the book when he talks about going to "Appalachian Ohio" to visit a lovely state park.
Despite the conservative heart warming nature of his National Review-worthy bootstrap pulling rise from working class poverty, Vance started writing the book while a third year at Yale Law. He continued writing it while an associate at Sidley Austin, ranked #7 in the AmLaw 100.
J.D. Vance is a tool.
One among many things that made the bile rise in this supposedly dirt poor hillbilly memoir was that in his senior year of high school, he had been taking golf lessons from a "former golf pro" for a year.
I'm not a "hillbilly". I do live in southern West Virginia right now, but I didn't grow up here. I'm not an Appalachian, or a "hillbilly". Not by a longshot. But neither is J.D. Vance. Not by a longshot.
A big part of what never sat right is that while J.D. Vance can certainly self-identify as a "hillbilly" if he wants, it consistently rings untrue.
He writes at length about Jackson, Kentucky, but throughout the book really only goes there for funerals. He grew up in Middletown, Ohio, and while Butler County and Warren County, Ohio, are most certainly the Rust Belt, they aren't Appalachia. Vance himself acknowledges this late in the book when he talks about going to "Appalachian Ohio" to visit a lovely state park.
Despite the conservative heart warming nature of his National Review-worthy bootstrap pulling rise from working class poverty, Vance started writing the book while a third year at Yale Law. He continued writing it while an associate at Sidley Austin, ranked #7 in the AmLaw 100.
J.D. Vance is a tool.
One among many things that made the bile rise in this supposedly dirt poor hillbilly memoir was that in his senior year of high school, he had been taking golf lessons from a "former golf pro" for a year.
I'm not a "hillbilly". I do live in southern West Virginia right now, but I didn't grow up here. I'm not an Appalachian, or a "hillbilly". Not by a longshot. But neither is J.D. Vance. Not by a longshot.
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