Vance, a former marine and Yale Law School
graduate, provides an account of growing up in a poor Rust
Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the
struggles of America's white working class. The decline of
this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly
disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with
growing frequency and alarm. J. D. Vance tells the true story
of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when
you were born with it hung around your neck. The Vance family
story begins hopefully in postwar America. J. D.'s
grandparents were "dirt poor and in love," and moved north
from Kentucky's Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of
escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a
middle-class family, and eventually their grandchild (the
author) would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional
marker of their success in achieving generational upward
mobility. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays
out, we learn that this is only the short, superficial
version. Vance's grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most
of all, his mother, struggled profoundly with the demands of
their new middle-class life, and were never able to fully
escape the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma
so characteristic of their part of America.
