Is JD Vance stealing his book titles from bell hooks?

As the internet noted earlier this week—and Claire Guinan at Jezebel observed yesterday—Vice President JD Vance may have a plagiarism problem. (Among his many others.)

On Tuesday, the man with the most hillbilly blood on his hands announced a new memoir. As Guinan has it, the “come-to-Jesus book,” Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, will hit stores this June.

Picking up where his problematic Elegy left off, this autobiography details “Vance’s journey ‘back to faith'” and touches on his recent “conversion to Catholicism.” Sure, fine.

But as sleuths have noted, there is publishing precedent for a Communion with a colon attached. bell hooks, the late Black feminist theorist, published Communion: The Search for Female Love in 2002. A characteristically warm and conversational work that marries theory and self-reflection, the guide was billed as a crucial intervention on its release. Which is to say, that project did not exactly fly under the radar of plausible deniability.

And the similarities don’t stop there. Before Hillbilly Elegy rocked the zeitgeist, hooks published a poetry collection called—wait for it—Appalachian Elegy. Which reflected on her own vexed relationship to her Appalachian roots.

The feminist theorist and scholar Tressie McMillan Cottom went even further down the rabbit hole in a Bluesky post yesterday. Side by side she noticed certain similarities in the authors’ cover designs.

Someone sent me this.

[image or embed]

— Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd.bsky.social) April 2, 2026 at 9:01 AM

It is quite sus, with the visual aids.

“Is this mere parallel thinking?” wrote Guinan. “I’m choosing to believe that [Vance] is a huge fan, rather than the other, more likely option, which is that he is appropriating IP from a prominent black, feminist voice.”

Alas, the former seems unlikely. Given all we’ve seen.