Hillbilly Elegy A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis Recommended by Sean Click

Blog Entry Number Two by Sean Click

I just finished J.D Vance's beautiful personal memoir Hillbilly Elegy. You'll

love this book if you love stories about self-made winners.

J .D. Vance grew up in the Rust Belt town of Middleton in southeastern Ohio during the nineteen eighties.  Vance’s family background is common to those who identify as Hillbillies.  Predominately Scots-Irish in heritage, this uniquely American group has lived for multiple generations throughout the Appalachians. 

Hillbilly culture is centered in the coal mining areas of West Virginia, eastern Tennessee, and eastern Kentucky but as economic conditions have necessitated many self-proclaimed Hillbillies have relocated for jobs into other areas of the country such as Michigan and Ohio.  For a brief time from the post World War II nineteen fifties, sixties and seventies these areas were flush with financial opportunity, but as manufacturing has shifted overseas in the eighties and nineties many of the financial opportunities for the American working class have too. 

Not having progressed educationally to take on non-manufacturing jobs, many are suffering from extreme poverty and despair despite the fact that the overall US economy is doing well.  According to Vance, feeling helpless and fatalistic, this group seeks to blame outsiders for their problems rather than looking at their own behaviors and attitudes emanating from Hillbilly culture as the possible cause.    Vance provides a thorough description of the culture and provides an enlightening overview of the distinctive attitudinal and psychological traits of those belonging to the large group of Americans.

The circumstances of J. D’s childhood are common for most children in his group. Despite growing up with a drug addicted mother, who marries serially, five times from the time JD is a baby until he is in high school, J.D is able to transcend his troubled circumstances to serve his country as a Marine and ultimately earn a law degree from Yale University.   He credits the love and support of his grandparents to giving him strength to resist the strong pull of apathy and addiction experienced by his peers. 

Personally It provided powerful insight into my not so distant ancestral Hillbilly roots to help me examine some of the psychological and socio-cultural frameworks I share with Vance that may have undermined some of my own development as a man.

His words also helped me recognize how fortunate I have been like Vance to have had family members some even who died before I was born that lived their lives against the grain of the cultural pressures predominant in Tennessee, Mississippi, Kentucky and Southern Illinois to make lives better for hopefully many generations of us to come.

If you want to really understand what deep bitterness is driving white Americans in the "fly-over" states of Appalachia to be manipulated by the ilk of Donald Trump, then Vance's memoir is a good starting place. Fatalism is the disease we need to fight in our homes before we try to fix our schools, decrease Chinese imports or secure the borders. Yet this book is not political. Rather it is the personal triumph of a young man who had major obstacles to overcome related to his mother's poor choices rooted in self destructive and self persevering Hillbilly culture.

Again I repeat you'll love this book if you love stories about self-made winners. Thank you J.D.