BOOKISH FRIDAY: “HILLBILLY ELEGY”

Welcome to another Bookish Friday, in which I  share excerpts from books…and connect with other bloggers, who do the same.

Let’s begin the celebration by sharing Book Beginnings, hosted by Rose City Reader; and let’s showcase The Friday 56 with Freda’s Voice.

To join in, just grab a book and share the opening lines…along with any thoughts you wish to give us; then turn to page 56 and excerpt anything on the page.

Then give us the title of the book, so others can add it to their lists!

What better way to spend a Friday!

My current read is an engaging memoir that I’ve been hearing a lot about.  Hillbilly Elegy:  A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, by J. D. Vance, is a powerful account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America’s white working class.

 

 

 

Beginning:  (Chapter 1)

Like most small children, I learned my home address so that if I got lost, I could tell a grownup where to take me.  In kindergarten, when the teacher asked me where I lived, I could recite the address without skipping a beat, even though my mother changed addresses frequently, for reasons I never understood as a child.  Still, I always distinguished “my address” from “my home.”  My address was where I spent most of my time with my mother and sister, wherever that might be.  But my home never changed:  my great-grandmother’s house, in the holler, in Jackson, Kentucky.

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Yes, more than a couple of sentences, but the whole paragraph seemed important.

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56:  There was, and still is, a sense that those who make it are of two varieties.  The first are lucky:  They come from wealthy families with connections, and their lives were set from the moment they were born.  The second are the meritocratic:  They were born with brains and couldn’t fail if they tried.

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Synopsis:  Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of white working-class Americans. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck.

The Vance family story begins hopefully in postwar America. J. D.’s grandparents were “dirt poor and in love,” and moved north from Kentucky’s Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually their grandchild (the author) would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of their success in achieving generational upward mobility.

But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that this is only the short, superficial version. Vance’s grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother, struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, and were never able to fully escape the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. Vance piercingly shows how he himself still carries around the demons of their chaotic family history.

A deeply moving memoir with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.

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Like many others right now (currently, there are over 2,200 reviews), I had to delve into this book and find out more.  So far, I’m amazed at how familiar some of these families and situations are, from my years of social work.  You can find these kinds of families in Central California, as well, and not just the Appalachians or the Midwest.

What do you think?  Would you keep reading?

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