The final week of my break deflated my glorious summer high like a pin in a balloon. My daughter came home from sleepaway camp the Friday before with Covid, and my doomscrolling urge took over with the trash can of American politics stuck in my head on loop. Covid in the house + political terror felt like some Groundhog Day scenario where I was frozen in 2020 and couldn’t get out. How are we still here?
Rewind the clock to 2017 when we were all confused, but the shock of the election had faded a little, and that terror was softening to a genuine curiosity of how did we get here and how do we get out? (Back before Covid and before the Kavanaugh hearings and before the fall of Roe when we thought it would be a hard four years, but then maybe we’d move on and be okay. Remember that world? I hardly do.) I was on an early date with a man who had a lot in common with me in terms of our backgrounds in Evangelical circles and our perspective on it as adults, and he read quite a bit. We had a lot to talk about, and I remember we were eating dinner at a patio table one night talking books, and between bites he said “Have you read Hillbilly Elegy?” and when I said no, he told me I should. By the time I woke up the next morning, I had a text that he’d gifted me the audiobook. I knew nothing much about it but decided to dive in.
This is the part when I have an unwanted confession to tell you: I’m a liberal southerner, but I found a lot of resonance in Hillbilly Elegy when I read it. I found the first half resonant and relatable and the last half preachy and political, but I raved about it anyway to so many people by telling them it was a worthy read. It was a time of a lot of confusion for me as people I’d grown up with and loved and respected endorsed Trump, a decision I could not understand until that book helped put the pieces together for me. It made me stop shaking my head in confusion and start understanding more about how 2016 happened in the first place. It’s not fair to blame rural voters for Trump’s presidency. (We can equally blame suburban Americans and white women for that.) But his book connected the dots for me on how a culture so far from Trump’s orbit could swear such a loyalty to him.
And here’s the uncomfortable thing I wish I didn’t feel but did– I related to much of Vance’s voiced experience. He said aloud things I’d held hidden. The discomfort of social mobility and family stories of fierce loyalty, addiction, anger, and forgiveness. The reality that money is only one small part of social class structures. The way that all my life I’d heard working class white people in the rural south use derogatory racist terms about “welfare queens” but collect just as much government help as those they judged. He explored the limits of education in a rural setting and that feeling of disconnect you have as an adult when you pursued higher education but others in your family didn’t. His foul-mouthed, gun-toting grandmother was the opposite of my soft and generous one, but their legacies were much the same. Like Vance, I am who I am largely because of the love and guidance of my grandparents, and their dreams worked as fuel for my own evolution. He used the first person plural “we” way too often to speak for the collective, but he also put words to the way the last few decades prompted a split in rural communities, or as he said it, “I knew even as a child that there were two separate sets of mores and social pressures. My grandparents embodied one type: old-fashioned, quietly faithful, self-reliant, hardworking. … The entire neighborhood embodied another: consumerist, isolated, angry, distrustful.” Some of our details may have been different, but he put a voice to my experiences and echoed some of my childhood observations.
As I rounded the corner for the final third of the book, I could see that our views on how these communities became this way were in opposition to one another. He seemed to think it’s as simple as setting your mind to something and doing it; breaking the cycles of generational trauma and poverty requires a strong will and only that. (A detail I did not realize when I listened to it as an audiobook is that he sometimes refers to his mother’s addiction as her “addiction” in quotation marks if that tells you anything.) By contrast, my view is that we have a whole group of people in America who were once hardworking and kind and generous but don’t recognize the world they live in now, who feel left behind and understandably distrustful of American politicians who call them deplorables. They don’t want to talk about non-gendered bathrooms and student loan forgiveness and climate change when they had babies at 18 years old and no college education to propel them, and they fill their days working too hard at jobs the rest of us won’t do, taking care of ailing relatives, raising grandkids, cooking for church potlucks, fixing a neighbor’s leaking roof – and never once seeing a true representation of their own experience in mainstream modern America. I see these problems as enormous and systemic and not individual. Mine and Vance’s perceptions on how to get out of this moment are wildly different, but our experiences shared a lot of similarities, and in ways, both of us still perhaps feel like outsiders looking in. When I turned the last page of that book, I saw him as an old school Conservative with a capital C, a never-Trumper, a man I couldn’t entirely relate to but could respect his opinions and experiences from a distance.
Two years after I read the book, I attended the Appalachian Writers Workshop where I fully realized for the first time how much damage that memoir had done. While my grandmother’s family hailed from southern Appalachia, I don’t feel like I can really claim the label of Appalachian anymore, but deep in the hills of eastern Kentucky, I met a lot of people who do. It was such a beautiful week and felt like coming home. I ate fresh corn and boiled peanuts and tomatoes and peach cobbler. I listened to George Ella Lyon sing a protest song with a washboard. I recited “The Brier Sermon” standing in a circle with people I’d only just met and felt my eyes water when, in unison, they began to sing “Amazing Grace” under the night sky. I heard from gay hillbillies and black hillbillies and young hillbillies and old hillbillies. Those who left home never to return again and those who have no intention of ever leaving. Many of us perhaps had childhood experiences similar to Vance, but the stories shared about those things carried a different charge and a softer edge, a fuller picture with more context. Picking up a copy of Appalachian Reckoning, I started listening. I worked alongside incredible writers that week – Silas House, Michael Croley, Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle, Rebecca Gayle Howell, and so many more – who represent the region with more nuance and care. In the end, I realized the damage that can be done when one view of a people becomes so widely read that the public thinks it’s the only view there is. If my life path is proof of anything, it’s a reminder that the rural south is a kaleidoscope. There are so many of us with a trove of memories living under our skin and a cultural heritage that will never leave us, and we still fiercely love this place even as we struggle with its history.
Elegy is such a beautiful word, one of my favorites. To me it means something different than what I see in his memoir. It is a lament, a mournful song, a love letter to what was there but isn’t there anymore. Like Vance, I feel like I spring from a disappearing place, but where we differ is that I still see the beauty and the complexity of the people I come from. I’m angry they’ve been conned and vote for Trump and they cannot see the beauty of a changing world and only fear its danger. Sometimes hearing them talk about politics makes me want to scream. But I love them anyway, and I don’t see the mess of the last few decades as entirely their fault. Our future world offers no place for them, and despite what Vance claims, no amount of bootstrapping and determination can change that.
To see J.D. Vance on the ticket with Donald Trump is so strange. First of all, to come to know someone through a memoir years ago and then now see him on the national political stage, and secondly because I read that book as a thesis on how we got to the terrible moment of 2016 in the first place. It seemed like he was explaining to me how our people were conned, and now he’s part of the con. There’s an opportunity for complex discussions about his view of poverty as an individual choice, the environmental and economic damage industries have caused in Appalachia, the intentional targeting of rural communities in the opiate epidemic to fill the pockets of big pharma, and the false media representation of rural southerners. But instead we skip all that nuance, and like everyone else in Trump-land, he’s become a two-dimensional cartoon of his former self with his misogynistic comments about “childless cat ladies” and the implication that women should stay in abusive marriages for the sake of their children.
In all of my doomscrolling, I think maybe what I’m hoping to find are answers and certainties that just aren’t there. J.D. Vance and I have more in common than you’d think, a fact I learned from reading his memoir. Yet we see the world entirely differently, and I don’t have an answer for why that is, but I just know it’s uncomfortable to see parallels with someone who stands side-by-side with Trump on my television. That’s the gray area I’m trying to sort out since I heard he was on the ticket. How have our similar cultural pasts led to such different perspectives? In the week after announcing his place on the Republican ticket, there was an explosion of chatter from southern writers and recirculating of already existing responses. (Like this excellent piece on Bitter Southerner , this Boston Globe piece from 2017, and this brief essay published on The Guardian written by Neema Avashia, a writer from my nonfiction cohort at the Appalachian Writers Workshop.) All of these essays rightfully assert that Vance’s book is two-dimensional and politically motivated and horrible. And maybe it is? But also, there are pages in that book that struck a familiar chord with me, and that’s a really uncomfortable thing to admit. I’m writing about it here instead of trying to polish an essay for a broader publication because I know I’d be skewered (or likely not even published at all) for saying I saw merit in that book at the time it was released when I felt it illuminated more context for Trump’s success. Now you’re left or you’re right, in or out, my side or their side. Everything that matters is lost in the gray.
The political and the personal are so tightly wound that we cannot pry them apart, and for me, that includes a complicated history of class, religion, gender, education, region, and a whole vault of childhood experiences that somehow left me with a completely different message than others who were right there with me having the same experiences. Vance wrote his elegy, if we can even call it that, for “a family and a culture in crisis.” And I guess this is my elegy for an America that once had a place for complexity. We’ve lost the wide angle lens; we’ve lost nuance and context; we’ve lost depth and the ability to discuss these things with a listening ear; we’ve lost the plot entirely and have no map to get us where we’re going. What’s that Yeats line? The best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with passionate intensity. That poem was written over a hundred years ago, but it’s the truest statement I can imagine at this moment and the only insight I have.
I’m sure if I read Hillbilly Elegy again today, I’d have a different opinion now that I see the full arc of his journey. I’d likely also have a different opinion because I’ve spent the last five years closely studying the genre of creative nonfiction and memoir. Can we even call his book a memoir? I’m not so sure. Memoir is self-interrogation, ruthless examination of your own choices, revealing vulnerabilities on the page. When all is said and done, his book mostly seems to say look at the trash I came from and what I became in spite of it. The old adage of “write what you know” is only a small part of it. I’ve heard it said before “write what you wish you didn’t know” is a better guide. I love that question and use it often to carve through revisions of my own work. What do I know that I wish I didn’t know? What am I scared to say?
So here’s what I wish I didn’t know. Trump has changed America forever. American politics in the Trump era have carved a chasm in my extended family that feels uncrossable right now. It is an elephant in the room, and it’s robbing me of valuable time with people I love because it sucks all the air out of the conversation, even as we avoid talking about it. I wish I didn’t know that hope is the scariest emotion, and as much as I hope we have a chance to finally see a woman at the helm, I worry that our entire system is so entrenched in binaries and profit and patriarchy that it will make it impossible for someone to lead us to an age of cooperative generosity. I wish I didn’t know so intimately how tightly tangled politics and religion are. I wish I didn’t know that my kids will never truly understand the fullness of where I come from because I chose to grow and reach and create a different kind of life for us, and now Trump’s politics have broken the space that lives in me that could have been the link between my childhood and theirs. What I wish I didn’t know is that America itself is a living elegy right now. Can you hear it? Sorrowful cries in remembrance of integrity and compassion and a time not long ago when civil discourse was possible. A heartbroken lament for a time long gone, mournful sounds we can hear all the time if we listen closely enough. Remember when we believed the best was yet to come?
This elegy—I feel it—like when you are standing right in front of the speakers at a concert—the vibrations felt deep within your chest.
Wow! Absolutely amazing essay! 👏👏👏