Hillbilly Elegy - J. D. Vance

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⭐ 6.5/10

(Originally written by KathleenQ)

A memoir about being raised in the Rust Belt of America by the author's hillbilly grandparents.

Maybe I read this at the wrong time. I read it after having read The Glass Castle (Jeanette Walls), hoping it would help me make sense of that author's mind-blowingly neglectful parents. It didn't really do that. (I don't think the Walls family were hillbillies, just a couple of disadvantaged white people with serious mental health issues and no support.) And to make matters worse, Vance isn't half as talented a writer, and his story isn't half as interesting, so his book felt kind of boring in comparison.

A few years ago everyone was saying this book was a must-read if you wanted to better understand how Trump got elected, and I've been meaning to check it out since. Again, maybe the timing was wrong, because it didn't really do that for me, either. I still feel frustrated by white people not understanding how their voting choices hurt people of colour and themselves. I didn't think the author offered many new insights, and had a lot of blind spots about his own life and culture despite having graduated from Yale.

His childhood stories were somewhat interesting, and I did learn a bit about hillbilly culture and the problems that plague white Appalachian working-class communities. Overall, it was fine.


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