Loved and hated

Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance’s “memoir of a family and a ­culture in crisis,” rocketed to the top of the bestseller lists in 2016 and, now that Vance is the Republican vice presidential nominee, it’s back as a bestseller again. All told, that means more than 90 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list and still counting.

Even more interesting, some of the people who claimed to admire the book back in 2016 have changed their story.

Hillbilly Elegy arrived with perfect timing and almost instantly became a literary sensation. Vance had been working on the book for years, and his project started out with an autobiographical section followed by cultural reflections. But his editor realized that the book would be explosive as a memoir.

Here was the story of a boy born into radical family dysfunction in Rust Belt America who escaped to join the Marines, where he found structure and patriotism and strong male influences, and then went on to graduate from Ohio State University and then—wait for it—Yale Law School.

When Hillbilly Elegy was released, Vance was identified as “a principal at a leading Silicon Valley investment firm.” Vance had graduated from law school at Yale, married an Indian American classmate, developed a career in finance (which turned out to be short-lived), and was living in San Francisco “with his wife and two dogs.”

Fast-forward to 2024, and Vance and his wife now have three children, he’s a United States senator from Ohio, and he’s campaigning as former President Donald Trump’s running mate. That means Hillbilly Elegy is back in the national conversation.

It’s easy to understand why the book became a sensation. Above all else, Vance has an incredibly compelling personal story, and his story is, to a frightening degree, a story shared by millions of his fellow Americans. It is a story of family resilience rooted in crushing poverty and grounded in Appalachia.

Vance, born as James Donald Bowman in 1984, was abandoned by his father and both neglected and abused by his mother, who struggled with addictions. The anchors in his life were his maternal grandparents, famously known in the book as Mamaw and Papaw. Vance would eventually take his grandfather’s name as a way of honoring them.

His grandparents’ story began when they became teenage parents, with Bonnie (Mamaw) becoming pregnant at age 13. James (Papaw) was only 16 himself. Their lives began in Appalachian Kentucky, but the young couple, driven by the need to start a new life together, went to Middletown, Ohio, then a rather typical industrial city in what would later become known as America’s Rust Belt.

In Middletown the young couple was surrounded by others from Appalachia, and the town became something of an extension of Appalachian culture. Vance spent summers back in eastern Kentucky, and he rightly understood himself as a child born into both family and social dysfunction. As he wrote, “Mamaw and Papaw may have made it out of Kentucky, but they and their children learned the hard way that Route 23 didn’t lead where they had hoped.”

Vance’s stories hit like lightning, and his prose was pitch-perfect. He set the context well, telling readers that the book is “about a culture that increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it.”

Vance’s memoir was powerful precisely because he let his personal story loose, leaned into narrative, and described the major characters in his life with amazing candor. Somehow, Vance mixed brutal honesty with personal respect. Vance’s foul-mouthed grandmother became the moral anchor in his life, even as Papaw served as his primary male authority figure, though one whose many struggles included his battle with the bottle.

Americans love stories that begin in adversity and end in great promise. That certainly is part of Hillbilly Elegy’s power. But there is more here than personal story, for Vance is a skilled cultural observer who sees the deep moral undercurrents shaping his private world and the public world around him. There had not been a book rooted in Appalachia that had become this kind of literary obsession for decades. Harry Caudill’s Night Comes to the Cumberlands was its own kind of literary sensation in 1963, but Hillbilly Elegy hit the bestseller lists and stayed there. Then, further setting the book apart, Ron Howard made it into a feature film starring Glenn Close as Mamaw.

The arrival of the book back in 2016 is itself part of the story. Americans were certainly aware of the economic collapse of the Rust Belt. In Hillbilly Elegy that story was combined with Vance’s roots in Appalachia.

But 2016 was also the year that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton squared off in the presidential election. It was in 2016 that Clinton, speaking to a group of elite Democratic donors, spoke of Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables,” referring with disdain to working-class Americans and their concerns. Ironically, in her own book about the election, Clinton would attempt to defend her comments by citing J.D. Vance and Hillbilly Elegy and what she cited as his description of “a culture of victimhood, grievance, and scapegoating.”

Looking back to 2016, it is now clear that the literary and social elites loved the book, or sure said they did. From London, The Economist declared it to be “the most important book about America” to appear at the time. Predictably, David Brooks described the book as “essential reading.” Jennifer Senior of The New York Times told her readers that Hillbilly Elegy was “a compassionate, discerning sociological analysis of the white underclass that has helped drive the politics of rebellion.”

Well, that was then and this is now. More recently, the literary and academic establishments have accused Vance of “blaming the victim.” Somehow, readers eventually caught on that Vance was making some transparently conservative arguments, grounded in conservative principles, including the importance of family, a strong work ethic, and binding morality. Did they miss the fact that the original text on the book jacket mentioned that Vance sometimes wrote for National Review?

Liberal academics, including some who identify themselves as “the community of Appalachian scholars,” now hate the book. As for the rest of the cultural elite, they must be scratching their heads and scrambling for ways to distance themselves from their earlier praise. They are turning on Vance with unusual passion. That’s to be expected in politics, but Hillbilly Elegy reminds us what’s behind the politics is infinitely more important.

This review has been corrected to note that J.D. Vance and his wife have three children.