The key ideas

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

J.D. Vance, 2016

A boy grows up amid shouting, constant moves and his mother's addiction, and ends up at Yale Law School. J.D. Vance tells the story of his family, from the mountains of Kentucky to a steel town in Ohio, and asks why it is so hard for kids like him to rise. This book shows how a childhood teaches helplessness, and who helps you unlearn it.

Who it is for

For anyone curious about how poor working-class America lives, seen from the inside. And for everyone who grew up in a troubled family and wants to understand what helps people get out.

Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash. I call them neighbors, friends, and family.

The guy who got fired for skipping work

Before he started at Yale Law School, J.D. Vance took a job at a floor tile warehouse in Ohio. It paid thirteen dollars an hour. Next to him worked a nineteen-year-old with a pregnant girlfriend. The boss hired her too. But the young man missed shifts and spent half an hour at a time in the bathroom, and his girlfriend often did not show up either. When he was finally fired, he was honestly outraged: how could they do this to him, when he had a pregnant girlfriend?

Vance opens the book with this scene because it shows the trouble he is writing about. There was work, and there was money. What was missing was the sense that anything depended on what you did yourself.

This book is about the people America calls hillbillies. A hillbilly family, in this sense, is a white working-class family from the mountain country known as Appalachia, along with their children who moved to the factories of the Midwest. Vance grew up among them, in the town of Middletown, Ohio. His mother struggled with addiction, and he barely knew his father. His grandparents raised him, and after that came the Marines, college and Yale.

Vance wrote the book at thirty-one, and he stresses that he has done nothing remarkable. He wanted to show from the inside what happens in the lives of the poor and what poverty does to their children. Ahead of you: a mountain town where everyone honors the dead, a grandmother who set her drunk husband on fire, a mother raging behind the wheel, a strict home at grandma's, boot camp, and a restaurant dinner where you have no idea which fork to use. And at the end, what Vance thinks matters most.

The town where cars stop for a hearse

Until he turned twelve, Vance spent every summer in Jackson, a small town in Kentucky coal country. That is the place he considers his true home. Once the boy saw every car on the road pull over to let a funeral procession pass, and he asked his grandmother why. He still remembers her answer.

The family called his grandmother Mamaw and his grandfather Papaw. Mamaw's kin, the Blantons, were a big family that lived by its own code of honor. Her brother, Uncle Pet, once heard a truck driver insult their mother. He pulled the man out of the cab and beat him unconscious. The driver lived, but he did not go to the police: he knew what it meant in those parts to insult someone's mother.

Vance sees two sides to this code. It holds a loyalty to your own that knows no compromise: you stand by your family to the end, no matter what. But the same code carries a habit of settling everything with your fists.

It has one more trait, which the author writes about with bitterness. In his words, mountain people learn from childhood to dodge an uncomfortable truth, or to pretend a better truth exists. This double edge runs through the whole book: what holds the family together sometimes drags it down too.

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About the author

J.D. Vance was born in 1984 in Middletown, Ohio. He served in the U.S. Marine Corps and graduated from Yale Law School. He later became a U.S. senator, and then Vice President of the United States.

All books by this author: J.D. Vance

Terms from the book

  • Jackson
  • Yale
  • Jimmy
  • Learned helplessness
  • Hillbilly: A mocking American nickname for mountain people, above all from Appalachia. Vance uses it for his family and himself without shame.
  • Appalachia: The region of the Appalachian Mountains in the eastern United States. Here it means a poor mountain country, above all eastern Kentucky, where the author's family comes from.
  • Middletown: An industrial town in southwestern Ohio where the author grew up. For many years its life depended on a steel mill.
  • Mamaw: What the book calls the author's grandmother. She became his main support and in the end took him to live with her.
  • Papaw: What the book calls the author's grandfather. He worked at a steel mill and drank for years, then quit and became a reliable adult for his grandson.
  • Blantons: Mamaw's big family from Jackson, her brothers and kin. Vance describes them as people with a harsh code of honor.
  • Pet: Uncle Pet, Mamaw's brother from the Blanton family. In the book he stands for mountain loyalty and a readiness to defend the family's honor with force.
  • Armco: An American steel company and Middletown's main employer. It recruited workers in the mountains of Kentucky.
  • Bev: The author's mother, Mamaw and Papaw's daughter. A nurse who struggled with addiction for many years.
  • Hamel: Bob Hamel, the author's stepfather, who adopted him as a boy. His marriage to the author's mother ended in bitter fights.
  • Adverse childhood experiences: A term from research on childhood: parents divorcing, violence, addiction among the adults at home and other hard events. Vance cites studies that link how many of them a child lived through to problems in adult life.
  • Food stamps: U.S. government aid that people on low incomes can spend only on food.
  • Learned willfulness: The author's own phrase, not a scientific term. It is his name for the opposite of helplessness: the habit of believing that effort shapes the outcome.
  • New Haven: A city in Connecticut, home of Yale University.
  • Usha: Vance's classmate at Yale Law School and later his wife. She helped him make sense of the unwritten rules of his new world.
  • Social capital: The connections and acquaintances that help a person get a job, advice or an opportunity. A concept from sociology.
  • Chua: Amy Chua, a professor at Yale Law School and an author. In Vance's book she is his mentor.

All terms

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