Hillbilly Elegy – 1st Reflection

 

Hillbilly Elegy is a memoir detailing the passionate but also chaotic white working-class family of the Vances. The author, J.D. Vance, started the life story of the Vances from way before he was born, from an era of teenage pregnancy and the prosperous industrial town of Jackson and Middletown, all the way to the time when his mother struggled with addiction and a bunch of debt. It is a personal analysis on his family and the white working-class crisis that is currently taking place in America.

 

To be honest, at the first dozen pages I was quite bored. Vance was building the narrative of the town that he lived in for most of his childhood, and he did so by retelling fun and captivating little stories of his time with his grandparents. But this is not just a retell of his life, this is a 265-paged long essay on the devastating state of the white working-class Americans; therefore, he provided studies, statistics, numbers on the specific subject. Which was not a good read before bed-time, for I would be asleep a few pages in.

 

But what really shines here is his struggle with his teenage life, his mother wanted to give her children a good father figure to look up to; hence, she would marry her boss, a guy that she had only met for a month, a drug dealer, and several boyfriends with abusive tendencies. Vance wrote due to the instability of his childhood life, he felt insecure and twitchy and nervous almost at all times. He failed almost all of his class, even his favorite subject, Algebra. He hung out with the wrong crowd; he smoked weed and destroyed community property. He lashed out at the people he cared about. He became a person he was not proud of. But eventually he changed his way, and worked his way up and graduated from Yale Law School. (I’ve only read to the part where he hung out with the wrong crowd.)

 

This memoir came to my attention because of the Netflix adaptation of the same name, staring Amy Adams and Glenn Close. And I gotta watch my girl Amy’s film because SHE IS AWESOME. The movie was good on its own, it paid respect to the original source material by reenacting the pivotal points of J.D.’s life with a few characters swapped out. However, the story became the struggle of a single family instead of the current state of the whole white middle-class, and that was quite disappointing. I think this memoir would do better as a mini-series because there are too much to tell and none of them could be left out.

 

After reading to the mid-point of this memoir, I was reminded of a YouTube channel called Soft White Underbelly.

 

It was made by a famous photographer named Mark Laita. He interviews people from all walks of life and put the videos on YouTube for people to watch and learn. One of the most captivating people under his lens was an Appalachian woman named Shannon. She lived in the same part of America as J.D.’s family and I could draw a lot of parallels between them. They were sharp, but because of the circumstances of their lives and families, often times their lives end up being tragedies. I really recommend people check out this YouTube channel and hear people’s life story. They would blow your mind.