Alissa Quart on the Dangerous Lie of American Bootstrap Narratives

Nonfiction writer Alissa Quart joins co-hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell to discuss how the American obsession with “bootstrap narratives” led to the publishing industry championing Hillbilly Elegy, the bestselling and problematic memoir by J.D. Vance, who was subsequently elected to the Senate and is now the Republican vice presidential nominee. Quart talks about Vance’s failure to credit those who have contributed to his success and reflects on both the fetishization of poverty and the importance of authentic representation. She also explains the long tradition of self-made man narratives and their underlying queer romantic elements, and compares Vance’s work to that of writers like Laura Ingalls Wilder and Horatio Alger. She critiques Vance’s recent remarks about childless and professional women and suggests the need for a more nuanced and expansive understanding of community. Quart talks about the nonprofit she leads, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and reads from her book, Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream.

Check out video excerpts from our interviews at Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website. This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

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From the episode:

V.V. Ganeshananthan: I’m Facebook friends with Eric Liebetrau, who is Kirkus’s former nonfiction editor, and on Friday he posted this Facebook status: “The single greatest regret of my two decades at kirkus was allowing Hillbilly Elegy to get such a glowing review. It’s something I won’t forget.” So how did this happen?

Alissa Quart: Well, I think there’s the bootstrapping narrative that I write about in my book and in this piece where it’s associated with conservatives, contemporary alt-right folks, that they’re going to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, that they’ve done it themselves, and then they look back with contempt on those they’ve left behind. And that’s the J.D. Vance narrative. 

But I do think there’s the liberal version, “our version,” which is this tolerance and this enshrining of a really cartoonish version of poverty that’s not necessarily authentic or really looking at the systemic problems behind poverty, but is just fetishizing—almost like 1970s Deliverance-fetishizing—this older idea of white poverty in the holler, and he fit right into that. I guess it’s intra-exoticizing. And, yeah, it’s nostalgic.  It’s faux altruistic. I mean, there’s all kinds of reasons why that book was appreciated.

Whitney Terrell: It’s wild to see this happen, because I think J.D. Vance is not the only person who has done a faux-Appalachia turn and been a success in the publishing industry, because the publishing industry loves those particulars: anyone who calls their mom “Mama” and runs around with a gun and shoots people or animals. For New York people, it’s like, “Wow, this is real American life!” And yet, J.D. Vance played on that. Agents repped him. Editors paid him advances. Reviewers reviewed him. I looked up the New York Times review from his book, and it says, “Now along comes Mr. Vance, offering a compassionate, discerning sociological analysis of the white underclass that has helped drive the politics of rebellion, particularly the ascent of Trump.” I’m sure that the writer would like to not have said that, but why are publishing industry people so vulnerable to these stereotypes?

AQ: This is part of why Barbara Ehrenreich and I created the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. That’s a nonprofit I run where 75 percent of our writers and photographers are financially struggling. We really want to have people who are close to the experience write about it for mainstream publications. And the problem is, you have the people like Vance who, by the way, his success is very much owed to this Silicon Valley overclass, right? And by the time he wrote this, he was already wealthy. But we wanted to have people who are still in that world and close to it and not saying they had some big connection to Kentucky, but actually living in Tennessee and Kentucky. 

I think that’s the problem. I think for many years, the press has been very coastal. It’s 73% coastal. It’s also very educated, which is great to some extent, but if you look at the mastheads of two of the three of the major newspapers, 50% went to Ivy or Ivy plus universities. Everybody is a college graduate. Only 10% of reporters were working-class identified. So that’s the problem. You don’t have people editing, assigning, and writing in publications who understand this experience necessarily. So they’re like, “Oh, this sounds real!” Even though it’s basically a bad version of Dorothy Allison.

VVG: I was thinking exactly about Dorothy Allison as you were talking and thinking she must detest this. Her work is so singular, so specific, and then to have this come along and skyrocket must feel so odious. In a way, it reminds me — I mean, very often as a writer of color, I’ll get the question, “Who are you writing for?” or “What is your audience?” I wonder if he ever got asked this question, who was his audience and was it actually this very gullible journalistic core. I can’t think of a ton of cultural critics who are writing about representations of the working class. Are there people that we should be reading? 

AQ: Somebody who I really read highly is Elizabeth Catte, who is Appalachian. I mean, if we’re just thinking of similar backgrounds, and she wrote a great piece for us in The Guardian. I can share with your readers some of EHRP work that meets this criterion. Also, Kerri Arsenault  wrote a book called Mill Town.

VVG: Of course, who we had on the show to talk about the East Palestine derailment, which also comes up, right? 

AQ: Yeah. And we have a lot of fellows at EHRP who are close to the experience. I was thinking of Alex Miller, who experienced homelessness and is a writer, and Bobbi Dempsey similarly lived in 70 addresses before she was an adult. You know, these are people who are also chortling at their escape. I mean, I think that’s part of the thing that’s really repellent about Vance. 

I have some incredible quotes. He said about the people he left behind in Ohio, “They were simply spending their way into the poorhouse. People talk about hard work all the time. In places like Middletown, you can walk through a town where 30 percent of the young men work fewer than 20 hours a week and find not a single person aware of his own laziness.” And then he said at another time, “You have to stop making excuses and take responsibility.” 

So you know, it was marked by bitter disdain, and it doesn’t have to be that way. And in fact, I’ve just been writing another piece for Lit Hub with Ann Larson, who has experience being working poor and still lives close to that experience, and she and I were looking at these terms. There’s a term from this theorist, Chantal Jaquet, which is the “class defector.” And the class defector is the person who leaves their background and goes to another class background. And we were arguing J.D. Vance is the “class traitor.” 

So there’s two genres, the class traitor and the class defector. We’re thinking mostly of the French, Edward Louis, Didier Eribon, or Annie Ernaux. And they still feel a complicated love for where they came from, but also have a critical perspective of where they’re going. I think that’s another thing that’s missing in J.D. Vance. He only seems to love where he’s going and hates himself for not knowing how to use a fork at a Stanford dinner.

WT: What’s implicit here is that one of the things that Trump got right is that there are East Coast elites. There are media elites. They do disdain people from the Midwest, and particularly from rural areas. I mean, I live in Kansas City. I don’t live in a rural area, but I am from the Midwest. I think of my friend Daniel Woodrell, who lives in West Plains, Missouri, is a tremendous fiction writer and has written about the place that he lives in, but he doesn’t get the kind of money behind his books that J.D. Vance got behind Hillbilly Elegy. I mean, his novel, Tomato Red, is really about some criminals discovering the idea of socialism. So, thinking about it that way, instead of thinking about capitalism, as J.D. Vance does all the time.  

I also was thinking about in this regard, there’s a scene from American Fiction, that novel that Cord Jefferson made into a movie, where the publisher and the publicists are talking to him and want him to be more stereotypical, and he agrees to do it. I feel like this is the version for white rural people. “Will you please also talk about the shooting and the drunkenness? Could you do more of that?”

AQ: It’s also really too bad that it wasn’t turned into something like Adaptation. Could you imagine if there was a meta version? How much better would it be if Spike Jones and Charlie Hoffman made a version of Hillbilly Elegy? It’s also offensive if you look at the title, Hillbilly Elegy. I guess there’s an argument right now whether “hillbilly” is a term that people are taking back. But when you read it, what it equals is an offensive, cartoonish word for poor whites plus sentimental poetic form. 

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Keillan Doyle. Photograph of Alissa Quart by Ash Fox.

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Alissa Quart

Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream • Thoughts and Prayers • Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America • Monetized • Republic of Outsiders: The Power of Amateurs, Dreamers, and Rebels • Economic Hardship Reporting Project • “JD Vance is the Toxic Byproduct of America’s Obsession with Bootstrap Narratives” | Literary Hub

Others:

Laura Ingalls Wilder • Horatio Alger • Barbara Ehrenreich • Dorothy Allison • Elizabeth Catte • Alex Miller • Bobbi Dempsey • Ann Larson • Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 6, Episode 32: “The East Palestine Train Derailment and Your Health: Kerri Arsenault on the Pervasive and Ongoing Risks of Dioxin” • “‘Dangerous and un-American’: new recording of JD Vance’s dark vision of women and immigration” by Jason Wilson | The Guardian • Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis • Going for Broke with Ray Suarez | The Nation • Going for Broke | NPR