JD Vance's Autobiography

 

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Frog Blog. My name is Philip Chen and in this blog I’ll be reviewing the

autobiography of American politician James David Vance, Hillbilly Elegy (“hillbilly” meaning a country person commonly

in the Appalachian mountain range over thirteen states). This memoir is focused on Vance’s childhood where he grew up in Middletown, Ohio, enlisting as a marine and graduating from Yale Law School.

By the way, Vance’s viewpoints do not align with my own and I am only reading his autobiography because I am interested in his growth and how he overcame a difficult childhood and went on to be a wealthy and successful businessman and the current Republican vice president for president Donald Trump.

The start of the book is about JD Vance’s experience living in Middletown after his family had moved there after World War II. JD was mostly raised by his grandparents who he called Papaw and Mamaw. When they got married, his grandparents moved from Jackson, a coal-mining town in the hills of eastern Kentucky, to Middletown, where they raised a son, Jimmy, and two daughters, Bev and Lori. His family protected each other in public and weren’t interested in middle-class rules of behavior. At home there was alcoholism and domestic violence, but Papaw had a good job at the steel mill and he and Mamaw became financially stable. While Jimmy and Lori became pretty successful, Bev wasn't as much. She cycled through many husbands and boyfriends and lost her nursing license because of repeated drug use. Bev’s children, Lindsay and JD himself, were more raised by Papaw and Mamaw than by her. As a place to live, Middletown began to decline sometime after JD was born because of economic and cultural problems. The many hillbilly migrants who, like Papaw and Mamaw, came to Middletown after World War II had a strong work ethic. In the generation born in Middletown, however, it became common to think that things like good grades in school and punctuality at work weren’t important. According to Vance, this outlook persists in Middletown today, and is one of the most harmful aspects of hillbilly culture.

After Papaw’s death, Bev’s mental condition and behavior worsened. Because of this, Mamaw insisted that JD leave his mother to come live with Mamaw full-time. So JD had a truly stable home life, supervised by an adult who cared about his school performance. He looked forward to attending Ohio State after finishing high school. But as graduation approached, J.D. felt unready for college so he joined the Marines. During the next four years, he learned new adult skills like how to stay in shape, how to work with people who come from different backgrounds, and how to handle himself in difficult situations. Most importantly, he learned that a person’s choices matter. When his enlistment ended, he was so disciplined that he earned his bachelor’s at Ohio State within two years. He graduated from Yale and is now married, doing things as an adult he could hardly have imagined as a boy. Looking back, Vance is very aware of how much his success depended on others who helped him: Papaw and Mamaw, his sister Lindsay, and patient teachers and professors. From Usha, his wife, he learned that family conflict needs patience, trusting conversation, not lashing out or withdrawal.

All in all, this book was very fascinating to me. I’m not the biggest fan of JD Vance as a person but seeing the origin story of famous people and what they went through and what they learned is always a great experience.

Thanks for reading, and see you next time!

Philip Chen