A Must Read Book for the Educated Class
I just finished Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance. I can’t recommend this book strongly enough. I loved it in so many ways.
J.D. grew in a single-parent (often zero parent) lower-income home in Middletown, Ohio and spent much of his youth also in his family’s cultural home of Jackson, Kentucky. His youth was surrounded by family members who struggled with substance abuse, violence, teenage pregnancy and lack of social mobility.
Yet J.D. ended up a Marine (with a tour in Iraq), was graduated from Ohio State University in under 2 years and then was graduated from Yale Law School. He is now a VC a Mithril Capital, which was co-founded by Peter Thiel.
The book is a memoir about an improbable journey from the working-class Hillbilly roots of Appalachia to the elite corridors of one of the top law schools in the US and the world of venture capital. It is a “Sliding Doors” tale of a few life events that lift Vance and propel him to cross socio-economic lines that are increasingly harder to pierce in the United States. In each case J.D. could have made slightly different choices and had a greatly different life outcome. I suspect many of our lives are more like that than we acknowledge and making strong choices about direction in key moments is often what defines us.
What I loved most about the book is J.D.’s raw honesty about his childhood. Nothing is sugar-coated: He describes his grandparents physically harassing and threatening a store-owner for asking their son not to play with the toys, he talks openly about his grandmother’s love of guns and the fear she instilled in others and he doesn’t hide the foul language that was second nature to her. He talks heart-breakingly about his mother who fought substance abuse her entire adult life, who tried to commit suicide, who vacillated between love for her kids and jealousy of them. And he talks about his absentee father.
As a graduate of Yale Law School he could have white-washed this childhood and gone on to silent greatness. He could have lived “Secrets and Lies” (one of my all-time favorite films, directed by venerable Mike Leigh) in which working-class British folks bury their past in order to tolerate the present.
Yet just as in the film — when the secret becomes exposed it becomes liberating for the characters who open up and the suppression in many way limits your freedom, your openness and thus your happiness. I hope that J.D. now feels more comfortable in his skin with the knowledge that exposing his childhood only makes the rest of us respect him even more.
The beauty of the book is precisely how human the characters are, how sincere the love is felt — regardless of familial flaws. 80% of Hillbilly Elegy is the memoir and the childhood and the exposure to life in poor, working-class towns bereft of their former manufacturing employers. The final 20% are some reflections that Vance offers on failed policies that, while well-intentioned, end up with the law of unintended consequences.
He profiles welfare recipients who find ways to cash Food Stamps for dozens of packs of soda, which are sold for cash in order to buy liquor and cigarettes. He talks about Section-8 housing vouchers designed to help assist families with housing but further bind lower-income neighbors while avoiding the NIMBY integration with the middle-classes. Vance and his working brethren clearly resented their small wages for the hard work they put in while many others chose instead to have welfare handouts that kill the working spirit. He profiles his Section-8 next-door neighbor who abuses drugs while her kids go unfed and unsupervised.
But Vance escaped it all. This is where Sliding Doors creeps in. His mom graduates high school as a salutatorian destined for college but falls pregnant as a teenager and begins a life of single-motherhood and squandered opportunities. J.D. was also clearly intelligent but hadn’t fully applied himself in high school and could have also descended into drugs and despair but a few key arcs and influences in his life lifted him onto a different track.
The childhood character of J.D., the Marine and the college student discovering the basic rules in life (wear a suit to a job interview, sparking water is simply carbonated water) are all so lovable that you find yourself wanting to hug this young boy and point him to the right path. He clearly found it by himself.
His first arc where his life starts in the right direction is when his grandmother (Mamaw) agrees to take him under her wings and let him move in full-time — escaping a substance-abusing mother who didn’t inspire Vance to better himself. Mamaw isn’t educated and, in fact, scorns “elites” but knows that if J.D. is to get ahead he must do well in school and go to college. What Mamaw lacks in social graces she makes up in life-lessons, discipline and an unwillingness to allow J.D. to feel sorry for himself.
The second arc is when J.D.’s cousin inspires him to join the Marines immediately after 9/11. In the Marines he learned what many privileged families in the US grow up with: physical fitness, nutrition, financial management, negotiations and overall leadership. By going to the Marines for 4 years prior to Ohio State he was able to enter university with a sense of purpose rather than as an escape and a chance to party.
The third arc comes in an odd place. Vance had decided that he wasn’t going to apply to the elite law schools — he wasn’t of that ilk — and he figured a regional law school was good enough. He was in Washington D.C. before applying and he saw a regional law school graduate who was bussing tables because that was the only work she could find and from this encounter he decided that it was worth the effort to try and reach one of the top programs.
J.D. got into Yale Law School and in so doing was cast amongst elite peers and people of all backgrounds and norms. He feared that he wouldn’t live up to their intellectual height and yet soon found that he truly was a peer and his life’s course had been permanently altered as society now accepted him as an elite member of the professional class. It is a huge ironic twist for a boy who comes from a region who seem to despise such elites.
The fourth arc is never stated by I can infer what it must have been. A law professor at Yale encouraged J.D. to explore his theses about the societal norms and values of white, working-class people from Appalachia and why America was leaving them behind. In pursuing his insights in the form of a book, J.D. was propelled again atop even his peer group of elites and into the fame of a political theorist during the most contentious political elections of any of our lives. He doesn’t ever seem to embrace Donald Trump as a potential president yet he cuts the clutter to offer below-surface explanations for why his people so overwhelmingly support Trump and disdain the leaderships of both parties.
It is this final arc that I suspect (it is never said) that led Peter Thiel to discover J.D. and complete his final arc from lawyer to entrepreneur to venture capitalist and this final leap is a very hard one to make, indeed. Perhaps I am simply inferring this final arc but reading Hillbilly Elegy I find myself impressed with Vance’s journey, grit, achievements and ability to elucidate the life in a region I scarcely understand.
Appalachia has 25 million people, making it about the same size at the state of Texas. That’s probably no surprise to anybody in the midwest or south but to a person who grew up in California and has never lived in that region I found it astounding.
And that is why this book is so important to read. It’s not just that it’s a lovable story of a young man overcoming life’s disadvantages but it also profiles the decay of a major region in our country who is being left further behind and becoming further disenfranchised and angry. This is Trump territory and while it would be easy to dismiss it in simple tones it would be wrong to do so.
What attracted me to the book was an interview I read with Vance in which he described how liberal Whites went so far to ensure they never offended any people of color or people with different sexual orientations but were quick to pass judgment on people from flyover states. Looking down at the white, working class seemed to be the only form of openly accepted prejudice amongst white elites. And in reading this description I knew that he was right and thus I wanted to learn more.
While waiting for your copy of Hillbilly Elegy to arrive you would be well served to read this blog post about today’s growing gap of wealthy vs. poor and the biggest chasm we’ve created as a society: perhaps bigger than gender, sexual orientation or even color. It’s a stark primer for the book you are about to read.
In another post coming soon I’ll write about my own journey. I hope to convince J.D. that while I grew up with very liberal, Jewish parents (dad from South America) in California and in a nuclear family without alcohol or violence I had surprisingly similar parallels to many of J.D.’s societal views — even if we may have drawn moderately differently conclusions about the underlying solutions.
Photo credit: ggpurk via Visual hunt / CC BY-NC
