Hillbilly Elegy is a memoir of a family as well as a culture that was in crisis. It is written and narrated by J. D. Vance. He is an American politician, conservative commentator, venture capitalist, and writer. As the narrator of this book, J. D. Vance did a top job and made his memoir so much special in its audio version.
J.D. Vance in this memoir tells the great story of what a regional, social and class decline feels like, especially when one was born with it all around the neck.
The story of the Vance family started in postwar America. The grandparents of Vance moved to Ohio from Appalachia in Kentucky, while being in extreme poverty. They moved there with the hope to escape from the poverty all around them. They then raised quite a middle-class family and their grandchild (J. D. Vance) then managed to graduate from Yale Law School. It was supposed to be the marker of their success in achieving upward mobility in the generational form.
But just as the family saga played out further, we came to learn that it was just the superficial, short version of it. The grandparents of Vance, his sister, his uncle, his aunt, and even his mother struggled hard with the demands of their new life in the middle-class status. Worst of all, they were not able to escape fully from the legacy of poverty, abuse, alcoholism, and trauma.
Hillbilly Elegy is an amazing, personal, and passionate analysis of a culture that was in deep crisis. It is a story of white working-class Americans. It is about their decline and as well as about the demographic of the country which has disintegrated quite slowly over the last four decades or so.
