Love in the Time of Hillbilly Elegy: On JD Vance’s Appalachian Grift

The hardest drive I ever had to make lasted 15 minutes. It was from my father’s house on a hilly farm in Winfield, West Virginia, to St. Albans, the small town I grew up outside, on the day of my mother’s funeral. I’d just flown in from Denver, and I hadn’t slept in days. My brother was in the hospital, and he was refusing visitors.

My aunt, who’d driven in from North Carolina for the funeral, and I had tried to find the cause of what we assumed was another overdose for my brother. With him stabilized in the hospital, we looked through his hundreds of keys, his boxes of glasses and knives he’d collected, to find the one to his biggest safe, where we assumed we’d discover one of my mom’s hydrocodone bottles squirreled away. His safe had some photos, a watch, some cologne. We thought maybe he’d attempted suicide, which was honestly unlike him, but grief does wild things. Maybe, we decided, he’d gotten the drugs from a girlfriend who’d pawned my mother’s remaining jewelry for the goods. It wouldn’t be the first time.

My aunt and I called his cell phone, left at home when the ambulance took him. We searched the house in frenzied precision, looking for an explanation to one narrowly avoided death to distract from the real one, my mother’s. We heard it buzz from the basement. We searched the insulation between exposed rafters, hoisted up on step ladders and a beat-up futon. It wasn’t there. We heard the buzz through the wood. It was upstairs. We ran back up and found it hidden under chip bags, inside a blanket folded, behind an empty gun case, in my brother’s bedroom. We searched his messages, but there was no proof he’d bought any drugs. As we later found out, he’d suffered acute kidney failure after not drinking any water, in grief.

He and my mother were inseparable; they loved each other fiercely, debilitatingly. They were tumultuous, but they’d saved each other’s lives again and again, over the years. He didn’t know how to live without her; he couldn’t care for himself when it wasn’t a byproduct of caring for her. He ended up missing our mother’s funeral because he was in hospital, and he never forgave himself for it.

When I walked into the funeral home, there were more flies around the single standing spray of flowers than people in attendance. One now-deceased cousin showed up in neon-yellow socks and gym shorts, and when asked, he said, “Sandy would want me to be comfortable.” My uncle, his father, would not speak to me because he’d told my mother she should abandon me because of my sexuality, but I was told his showing up was his version of respect for me, and I should be happy with that. People told me I looked great, in a blazer my aunt had bought me for job interviews. “Harvard looks good on you,” they said. “We loved that obituary you wrote. We could tell you wrote it; it was poetic-like.” Even there, when I couldn’t afford to bury my mother, they saw me as my education, as my profession.

I paid the singer–preacher my mother loved, who consoled the audience by saying she succeeded in being a woman of God. It offered me no consolation. This funeral wasn’t for me. This funeral was for the people who, judging my mother an addict, never showed up to mourn her. At least, I thought, in the Charleston Gazette, I’d show my mother for the intelligent, complicated woman she was in the obituary I wrote. It was, of course, maudlin, but it was honest, and it cost me $400 to publish. I’d used my education, my grad student stipend, to give her that much.

*

I’ve been told I must think highly of JD Vance. He went to Yale, and I went to Harvard. We both had mothers suffering from addiction. We both “beat the odds.” We both became writers.

There’s a stigma to leaving Appalachia for education, as Vance and I both eventually did. The brain-drain is real; people who leave to get degrees rarely come back. There is a distrust of prestige, of getting too much education, of growing too big for your britches. Vance might have been told what I was told: that going to an Ivy League school was the worst decision I could make, that I’d never be accepted, that I would be brainwashed by Harvard’s liberalism and grow to hate Appalachia.

Vance is everything my community feared I would become, but not because of education.

Vance might well destroy higher education entirely.

I left WV because I believe I would have died if I stayed there. I hesitate to write any of this because I do not want to reinforce the negative stereotypes that Vance has propagated into the minds of readers of Hillbilly Elegy, but Appalachia can be a difficult place to live. I feel the need to spell out the reasons I chose to leave it.

First, I’m not sure I could ever pass as straight, but I sure as hell felt I needed to, as often as possible, to stay alive in my hometown. Too often I’d hear stories of how a boy at school who wore his hair long, painted a single pinkie nail silver, or spoke in a high-pitched voice had been cornered after school, bloodied, and sometimes worse. This was the power of my town’s narrative: to make me afraid.

I decided to make myself infallible and therefore irreproachable. I played sports so no one could say I was too delicate. I made perfect grades so no one could call me stupid. I got thin so no one could call me fat. When folks did eventually find out about my sexuality, I suffered for it. This is not the space for that story, but it is a huge part of why I chose to go to college far away from home. In Vance’s memoir, his mamaw asks him, when he wondered whether he was gay as a boy, whether he “wanted to suck dicks”—capitalizing on the hypersexualization of same-sex relationships, retraumatizing those of us for whom gayness was more than a passing thought and political aside, and strengthening the trope of the Appalachian mamaw—the irascible, crass, disheveled, lard-cooking matriarch whom he claims might have “killed a man.”

Second, school had been my refuge from a difficult home life, so I wanted to attend the best schools I’d heard about. I applied to 20 schools. As a working-class teen, I saw education as a tool for survival and writing as a way to make myself distinct from those with similar grades from better schools. I wrote a packet of poems about angels, blood, and poplars—childhood images—and stapled them to my application essays.

I believed, and still believe, writing gives me the power to find safety.

I also believe writing is capable of terrible harm.

*

I won’t generalize my upbringing or claim it’s paradigmatic of Appalachian experience, as Vance does. Mine was marked by solitude and precarity. I never directly wrote about my mother and brother, who dealt with addiction, disability, and pain their entire lives because I understand my writing could just as easily be used to render them unredeemable for their mistakes, if I’m not careful. However, I must share some things so that you know why I’m so aggravated by Vance’s taking ownership of my narrative.

My mother had her first cigarette when she was 6 and her first opioids when she was 9, from a cousin, if story serves. She eventually became disabled after a work injury, had many back surgeries, and became addicted to opioids, among other things. She suffered from various mental illnesses and attempted to take her life several times. When she was mentally better, her physical health was poor. When she could still walk, her mind was most vicious. She collected angels. She spent entire days in her garden, tending to the lilies and bleeding hearts, the soft lamb’s ear and finicky rose. She was a devout churchgoer. She loved to sing in the choir in her red skirt suit, to make seven-layer dip in Pyrex to bring to the church cookout, and to make calls for the prayer chain. The church was her community; she reveled in helping others, even if through a call. Her church eventually would not marry her because she had had too many divorces. She did not turn to drugs and away from God, as Vance claims Appalachian addicts do. The church turned away from her, and she still went.

Later, between her back injuries and surgeries, subsequent addiction, two shoulder replacements, a heart attack, emphysema and COPD, an oxygen machine blown up by a cigarette, a morphine pump implant in her stomach, a few mental breakdowns, cabinets empty of food, tears at Christmas because the tree was too bare of presents, a son with several overdoses and another son who went to Harvard, she was a husk of herself. She’d say, “Well, I can’t be a failure because I raised you.” She was unpredictable, even when I was a child, and I could never tell whether what I was seeing was medical or pharmacological. Was she asleep or dead, when I’d go to her back room, my brother gone, to pick the food out of her mouth as she was sleeping? Where was she, when she wasn’t home? Would we have dinner tonight or should I go to my dad’s? When she wanted to stop taking pain and anxiety medicine, her doctors told her she’d need it for the rest of her life. She couldn’t stop the loop of her own trauma, but not for lack of trying.

When I first told her I was going to Harvard, she was overjoyed, told me she always believed in me, and said I would do better for myself than she ever could. The last thing she said to me, after we hugged, before my dad drove me to Cambridge was, “This’ll be the death of me.”

Still, after I arrived at Harvard, she sent me the gifts she always had: a pink stuffed bear for Valentine’s Day with a chalky pack of Sweethearts; a two-pound peanut butter egg, my childhood favorite, handmade at the local church, for Easter; an assortment of things she’d put on layaway for my birthday, including a watch, some knit socks, and shirts. She’s pack in ramen noodles, name-brand chips and pens, pencils, composition notebooks, and various medicines—hers or OTC—she thought I might need. She was always worried I’d get sick, like she had, and stop myself before I ever began.

Occasionally, she’d send me twenty dollars. I felt horrible the one time she sent me fifty dollars, in a card brimming with her loopy writing, because I knew that meant she was going without. She had no idea that the fifty dollars she’d likely sold the pills she needed to get (she did actually need a certain number; addicts often start as folks sick with something else) would barely buy me the toiletries I needed for a couple of weeks, at Cambridge prices, even if I got the off brand. She showed up for me in the ways she could.

My brother, almost six years my senior, who would often sign the cards she sent me, which she kept a stock of in the drawer of an old dresser in the living room in case someone needed to hear a kind voice, was an addict, arguably, since middle school. He was bipolar and schizophrenic, and he dealt with chronic pain from Crohn’s disease that he used drugs to dull. He is also, perhaps, the person who showed me the most straightforward love, consistently, throughout my life. Another story.

I had to leave Harvard, for weeks at a time, to fly back to WV to make sure that my brother and my mother weren’t dead when I couldn’t reach anyone on the phone, or I’d be called to mediate a conflict. The same happened when I was at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, when my mother was in the hospital with an infection and her new husband was feeding her pills on top of what the hospital was giving her, without her being able to stop it. She eventually divorced him, shortly before her death. My mother and brother both lost their battles within a year of each other, just before and just after I graduated with my PhD, in the middle of the pandemic. They both fought. Again, another story.

*

Both Vance and I studied the rhetoric that teaches us that what I’ve just written for you, part of my backstory, gives me the ethos to claim I know Vance’s story, so you should listen to me. It also tell us that Vance, when he invokes Appalachian stereotypes, is knowingly manipulating his reader for personal gain.

*

I understand why Vance, a son of a mother suffering from addiction, felt the need to get out; he and I both left humble and difficult homes to study at prestigious schools. I studied writing; Vance studied philosophy, politics, and law. But it is flabbergasting that he could beat the proverbial odds, go on to educate himself in how power works, study the intellectual history behind thought, and then choose to propagate a toxic narrative of an underserved population in print. He’s weaponizing literature to do harm. He has misused his education to promote his image as a man of the people, for the people, when he has only ever been about himself.

Vance’s memoir purports to give an intimate portrait of Appalachian life—to show how his resilience, ability to thrive despite his mother’s addiction and his grandparents’ relative previous poverty, and breaking his family ties ultimately led to his success. He also says, “I want people to understand what happens in the lives of the poor and the psychological impact that spiritual and material poverty has on their children.”

Vance did not grow up in poverty or in Appalachia. He grew up middle class in the Rust Belt, in Middletown, Ohio. His grandparents were from eastern Kentucky, in Appalachia, and he visited their old homestead during holidays. His experience with Appalachian poverty is the equivalent of a student writing about their summer vacations.

Vance is quick to qualify his success with faux-humility: “I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve accomplished nothing great in my life, certainly nothing that would justify a complete stranger paying to read about it.” Still, he claims the book is a representation of “the American Dream as my family and I encountered it.” He is playing off the belief, widespread in Appalachia, in my experience, that folks who are suffering from addiction, in need of social welfare, or otherwise down on their luck are to blame because they didn’t work hard enough. Vance boldly generalizes his family as “hardworking, except of course for the many food stamp recipients who show little interest in honest work.”

Vance made of his family an overused Appalachian trope, with a mother to be blamed for her addiction and other family too lazy to work, so let me make of my mother a single example to disprove him. My mother, who was embarrassed of her food stamps, tried and failed to keep several jobs. She was working as an in-home health aide, something that could put her teenage nursing tech-school to use, when a woman died, fell, and first injured my mother’s back. Before that, she was fired from the meat counter at a now-closed grocery store because the wife of the owner didn’t like how friendly she was. She accused my mother of sleeping with her husband. My mom was gregarious when her body was healthy. She’d been the star majorette, the popular girl who hid her passion for reading and writing after high school, where she sold English-class poems for five dollars a pop. Despite two children and several failed marriages, she wanted nothing more than to be loved. She always needed approval, even from those who’d abused her. She talked too much, focused a lot on her appearance, and fell into deep depression when the strategies that made her popular in her youth didn’t win her favor as an adult.

How cruel that every conversation is political, a negotiation of power, when being confident, even in your own kindness to a stranger, can cause you harm.

Vance affects kindness to Appalachians in attempt to gain their favor; he says, after all, at Yale, that he “learned the value of real social capital.” The fact that he is from Ohio, historically a swing state, is one reason he was picked as a candidate for vice presidency. He seeks to appeal to Appalachians, in Ohio and elsewhere, by playing on Appalachian values of modesty. In the prologue to Hillbilly Elegy, he says, “I’m not a senator, a governor, or a former cabinet secretary,” to appeal to the Appalachian suspicion of confidence. The implication is “…but I could one day be—and look, I understand you.” He learned this rhetoric at Yale Law School for interviews, according to him: “our career office emphasized the importance of sounding natural and being someone [you] wouldn’t mind sitting beside on an airplane.” He might seem good at it, if you don’t know enough about Appalachia to call bullshit on his book, in which it’s clear he is an outsider writing for outsiders. As he says, the “most difficult test […] is getting an audience in the first place,” an audience that his book secured for him.

Even in the prologue to his memoir, Vance seeks to separate himself from the elite, liberal group with whom he attended school and who were his true audience: “I do not identify with the WASPs of the Northeast.” Instead, Vance aligns himself with the “working-class white Americans of Scots-Irish descent who have no college degree” and for whom “poverty is the family tradition.” But it’s not his tradition, even if he claims it. Even so, he echoes the Appalachian/conservative belief that hard work always equates to monetary success and that if you’re poor, you have no privileges. His false humility is most obvious when he distracts from his millionaire venture-capitalist-lawyer status by highlighting his hardworking, past working-class status. He sidesteps his educational background to foreground his connection to addiction and play up his false Appalachianness.

Poverty is not a “tradition,” something that you continue because of its cultural richness; it is a curse that I was told, as a child, I could reverse with education. Education does not always guarantee money and power, nor does it promise to, but it does offer certain richness of experience. I’ve been asked, incredulously, why I would “get out” of West Virginia, go to Harvard, and instead of getting rich with a STEM degree, study poetry, which, I’ve been told, “has no bearing on the real world.”

But Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir, a work of literature, is certainly having a real effect on our political landscape. And my writing, poetry mainly, has allowed me to find safety by physically moving place to place through upper education. Humanities departments are often notoriously underfunded and under siege. This is not a problem with the career path but a widespread devaluing of the very kind of education that teaches us to speak about difficulty, to point out problems that need to be fixed, that reminds us humanity is at stake in Vance’s totalizing an area as irredeemable—and then making a political career off the backs of those he rebukes, including his own mother.

*

In a recent public event after receiving his nomination, JD Vance stands on the stage and announces how he is excited to take on the vice presidency. He uses this moment to call attention to his mother, who’s in the audience, and he states she is ten years sober. When the camera pans to her, she looks embarrassed. She stays silent as the crowd cheers for her. She manages a pained smile. Her hair is curled and volumized, like my mom’s always had been. I remember how she taught me to tease the back of her head with a pick and a can of Aqua Net before church. She’d always say she had thin hair, so she needed to “pump it up.” She shimmied and invited me to join as we sang “Pump, PUMP it UP!”

I can see my mother in Vance’s mother, who suffered from addiction and lost her nursing license as a result. In the video, she wears the same puzzled, ashamed, and proud expression my mother did when she was treated, at a fancy bar in Harvard Square, by my thesis advisor, days before my graduation. I sent money home for the first time just weeks before, from my poetry thesis awards: to fund her and my brother’s travel to Cambridge, to pay an electric bill, to buy some prescriptions, and to buy a nice dress. She’d gone to Cato in the strip mall in Nitro and picked out a bold pink floral that flowed to the knee. She looked beautiful.

My mother told my thesis advisor that she loved me but never knew how to help me because she didn’t understand what I was writing. She hoped I wasn’t embarrassed of her. My advisor told my mother, “Sandy, Justin loves you, and he’s a songbird; he was made to sing.” My mother cried then, rare for her to do in public, in what I think was joy, but also an understanding that I would go on doing something that could hurt her, if she became my subject, as Vance’s mom became his. The difference is I never wrote directly about my mother when she was alive, in the thick of her battles. Even now, I hope I’m not betraying her.

Vance believes that addiction, like poverty, is a choice. He says, toward the end of Hillbilly Elegy: “There is room now for both anger at Mom for the life she chooses and sympathy for the childhood she didn’t.” He congratulates himself on creating boundaries and helping his mother, when he can, “by the grace of God.” Would he have brought his mother to this event if she had not recovered? Would he have composed an invective against her if she had not supported his exploitation of her in Hillbilly Elegy? Would he have been too embarrassed, as my mother feared, to claim heritage to those who “failed” to beat their sickness successfully? Is this public shaming his idea of help?

I don’t understand why empathy for someone suffering from addiction, as my mother and my brother and grandfather did, is such a radical stance to take—especially when people from Appalachia are only ever once or twice removed from someone in its claws. I do understand Appalachia’s distrust of prestige, even if it’s totalizing: that people in power, as Harvard and Yale have a reputation for educating, will use their power to further demean Appalachia. Would Vance be where he is if not for Yale, where the Tiger Mom, who prioritizes success and sees it as a way of rising above adversity, advised him to write Hillbilly Elegy? My guess is: yes.

Education may bring opportunities, new ways of thinking, but you choose what to do with them.

Like Vance, I was angry at my mother for years. But not once did I decide, after getting a “fancy education” with the “WASPs of the Northeast” and becoming a writer, even while working on my current manuscripts—that look directly at my Appalachian queerness, family opioid addiction, and the rise of Trump in WV—that I should villainize my family and community by using any platform that writing gave me. (Nor did I think I should idealize the region because it is full of natural beauty and smart, kind people.) My education instead made me aware of the dominant narratives of Appalachia, like Vance’s memoir and self-branding, that render its population not only to blame for their problems but also too stupid to learn how to fix them. Such beliefs keep Appalachian schools underfunded and Appalachian teachers underpaid; they encourage the brain-drain.

I, and many others who reckon with the contradictions of Appalachia, must negotiate publishing politics before we try to prove a politician wrong through narrative. We’re Sisyphus waiting to roll our boulder up the hill. These complicated stories of nuance don’t sell, nor do they pander to the craving for stereotypes that Vance’s appetizing blend of easy tropes, rags-to-riches, and exceptionalism inspires.

Meanwhile, Vance is positioned as a spokesperson for Appalachia.

*

I remember, in college, when MTV’s Buckwild came out. It was shot in Sissonville, a small town in the northernmost part of the county I grew up in, Kanawha. The most vivid image I remember is a bunch of thick-accented young men and women having a party at a large house, out in the relative wilderness. They filled a dump truck up with water and used it as a swimming pool, jumping off the house into rusty murk. People below clinked their Bud Lights in celebration.

I remember classmates asking me whether what we watched was true. It was campily ridiculous: who, if they had money for a nice house and a dump truck, would pay to fill a dirty metal receptable as a pool instead of, you know, just buying a pool? Who in Kanawha County would have the money and time for such antics, such displays of extravagance, without any of the polish of a life of class—like that of some of the richer folks in Kanawha, in South Hills, perhaps? Of course, reality shows are scripted, but this seemed to be anything but reality. “I can see why you got out,” I heard. My classmates were not evil, and they were not stupid. They were fed a narrative that Appalachians are simultaneously poor and extravagant, ill-mannered and egotistical, stupid and still skipping school to fuck in the woods in the absence of good parenting. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy would agree; he states that Appalachia is “full of drug addicts and at least one man who can find the time to make eight children but can’t find the time to support them.”

One of the biggest dangers of Vance is his implication that Appalachians are not only stupid but ineducable; such is the malicious misconception of thinking people choose to be ill, poor, or down on their luck. But my mother, Appalachian as they come, is just one example that proves him wrong. Years after leaving WV, I was home for a holiday. Mom was in her back room, where she lived the last many years of her life, in bed, when she asked me about Caitlyn Jenner. She’d been reading about her, had checked out library books on transness, and had watched her on TV. She asked me whether I was a woman, like Caitlyn. She worried for me, in that moment, because she knew what people said about Caitlyn and what they did to women in general. I explained to her then, using the language I’d learned in college, the difference between sex, gender, and sexual orientation. She asked questions. She said she didn’t want me to think she was stupid. I used my education to explain, in simple terms, why I was not a woman. She was relieved because at least, as she said, “being a man will keep you safe.”

Vance, who is a man just as educated as I am, who is a writer trained in rhetoric and law, could very easily explain why he is pro-life and a turncoat pro-Trump, but he feels no need to explain himself. He could instead now have the power to limit gender-affirming care and women’s health, even though Appalachia has a tremendous need for this type of healthcare. In fact, Appalachia has some of highest rates of trans youth in the nation, and unplanned pregnancy and poor health outcomes are already disproportionately high here. Vance doesn’t know who he is, so he sells a version of himself he thinks will afford him more power.

*

I have often felt, in some circles, that I need to perversely qualify my being from West Virginia because narratives like Vance’s prevail. I hate being reduced to a resume. I bristle at being encouraged to say—and I have been, for applications—that I “beat the odds.” As if hard work is inherently redemptive or Appalachian success should come with a tragic backstory to validate it. But there are a million jokes about West Virginia involving toothlessness, cousins marrying, and having sex with animals that I feel the need to dispel. When an interviewer once expressed surprise that I’d grown up in WV, based on my credentials and how “articulate” I was, I gave him a big smile and pointed at it. I said, “Most of us have teeth like this, too.” Obviously, I didn’t get the job.

I don’t have the money and power that Vance does, but here’s what I’ve learned: Appalachia is a distinct place. It is easy to spin false narratives about it because not many people know much about it outside the region. Addiction is a public health crisis here, as are mental health and heart disease. Queer people, women, and non-white people live here. Its relative lack of monetary and educational resources exists alongside its wealth of natural beauty.

Growing up in a place of natural beauty reminds you that the earth is alive, and it’s sick. Growing up with few resources amid addiction teaches you to make much of little, to use imagination as refuge, to be attentive to those around you, and to care for those who are not always well enough to care for you back. It reminds you that community extends past your biological family and that family is a responsibility and gift. It reminds you that salary is not the measure of a person.

Education should not lead to simple, totalizing answers. Education should lead to more questions: how can we help a place that, at times, doesn’t know to ask for help or, understandably, distrusts those in power? How can we, as writers, tell stories that reckon with beauty and devastation, kindness and crisis?

My education, prestigious or not, showed me that counternarratives are important and possible, but we must first be aware of the dangers of the fictions that prevail about Appalachia. If I learned anything, it’s that writing has real power. It encouraged me to return to Appalachia as a professor, to empower Appalachians with the skills they need to write their own stories. I use Hillbilly Elegy as a cautionary tale of what not to do with the power of language.

Appalachia is mired in contradictions, but not the ones Vance invents: poverty of morals, addiction by choice, and a “culture in crisis” (a subtitle to his Hillbilly Elegy). We do, however, need to stop thinking that education is a tool of evil. We need to stop assuming that addiction, disability, and poverty are personal failures. We need to hold people, not their origins, accountable for their actions. We need to stop electing people who revile us. We need to stop confusing liberalism and social welfare programs with moral shortcomings. We need to stop voting against our own interests. We need to stop thinking hard work equates to success and  that asking for help is a failure.

Even the most hardworking Appalachian man might jerk at the sight of a snake, and JD Vance is one of them. Any representation is not good representation. My final words to Appalachians: Vance is not of you, but he will continue to profit off you, if given the chance.

And a final message to my mother: I was never ashamed of you. I didn’t always know how to speak to you, but I keep close your message of abiding love. That is our Appalachian tradition. Now I’m speaking loudly, for you.