Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance describes the author’s life up to this point and uses his experiences to illustrate the challenges facing hillbilly society generally. The memoir begins with a description of Vance’s family in Jackson, KY. These relatives, he states, were part of a storied hillbilly family with a strong reputation in their community. They embodied many of the most prevalent values of this culture, most notably fierce loyalty to each other and a deep respect for personal honor that often dictated a violent response to perceived slights. Vance’s grandparents, whom he calls Mamaw and Papaw, migrated from Jackson to Middletown, OH to work in an industrial steel mill. This experience was common among hillbilly families at the time, many of whom left their rural homes for urban areas. In Middletown, Mamaw and Papaw had three children, the author’s uncle, aunt, and mother.

Download Hillbilly Elegy Study Guide. Subscribe Now On one hand, hillbilly culture is a source of personal pride. Hillbillies put high value on family honor, ready to defend sisters and mothers no.

Although he lived with his father in early childhood, the two were separated when his parents divorced and would not reconnect for many years. J.D. spent the majority of his childhood living with his mother in Middletown, though he often visited Jackson, a place he will always consider his “home.” J.D. also had a very close relationship with Mamaw and Papaw, who strove to support and encourage him to achieve high levels of success. This support became particularly important as J.D.’s mother became emotionally unstable and struggled with drug addiction. His middle school years, in which J.D. moved frequently due to his mother’s constant change of boyfriends, were extremely challenging for the author. Eventually, he lived permanently with Mamaw, an experience he credits with allowing him to succeed in life. It is clear throughout his memoir that Mamaw was his single most important influence.

• Based on the bestselling memoir by J.D. Vance, HILLBILLY ELEGY is a modern exploration of the American Dream and three generations of an Appalachian family as told by its youngest member, a Yale Law student forced to return to his hometown.
• Hillbilly Elegy is a memoir and analysis of working-class Americans who lived in the Appalachian Mountains—especially in Kentucky and Ohio. The author, J.D. Vance, is a former Marine who also graduated from Yale Law School.

After graduating high school, J.D. joined the Marines for four years before attending college at Ohio State. This experience instilled him with a strong work ethic and the confidence that he had the ability to better his life through his own choices. This feeling, as Vance argues extensively, is largely absent from hillbilly society. He considers this to be a major cause of the decline and poor outlook of communities like Middletown. Following college, Vance attended Yale Law School, where the differences between his lifestyle and that of professional-class Americans became extremely clear. At Yale, J.D. met and began dating his future wife Usha. The two are happily married lawyers, but J.D. still feels that his hillbilly upbringing plays a major role in his life. Throughout the memoir, the author suggests how his society could be improved, most of which center around the need for its members to take responsibility for their own problems.

Introduction

J.D. Vance was raised by his grandparents in an economically depressed town in Ohio. He had a parent who struggled with addiction. Few members of his extended family attended college. Vance himself almost failed out of high school, but he was rescued by a few caring people. Vance wants to explain what it is like to live in despair, to escape that despair through “upward mobility,” and to be haunted by one’s former life even after one has left it behind.

The people Vance grew up with are known as “hillbillies.” (This is a term that some believe is offensive and some—including Vance—embrace.) Their home region, Greater Appalachia, reaches from Alabama and Georgia to Ohio and New York state. They are working-class whites with no college degrees. They are poor, and of all population groups in America, they are statistically the most pessimistic.

Some of this pessimism is due to lack of economic opportunity, but the culture of Appalachia, Vance writes, “encourages social decay instead of counteracting it.” To explain what he means, Vance will sometimes quote academic studies, but he is offering a personal recollection of his own life and the other people in it. Vance has changed some names, but he has tried to be truthful to the facts as he knows them. While some of his views—including those about the causes of poverty and addition—are controversial, Vance feels he has come by his beliefs honestly.

Chapter 1

As a boy, J.D. Vance spent his summers and much of the rest of the year in Jackson, Kentucky, at his great-grandmother Blanton’s house. In his mind, this was his home. Middletown, Ohio was where his father abandoned him and his mother took up with one man after another. In Jackson, J.D. was the grandson of two respected people, his “Mamaw and Papaw.” His uncles taught him that in Breathitt County, people did not need the law’s help in punishing a criminal or defending family honor. Mamaw supposedly shot a cow thief when she was only twelve.

However, while the Blanton family always had enough to eat, not all families did. Today, conditions are much worse. Nearly a third of the town lives below the poverty line, but people are content to be unemployed. An epidemic of drug addiction has brought with it a rise in crime. Vance believes that Appalachians are in denial about these problems. They dismiss negative media portrayals of the region as lies and distortions. This mix of toxic behavior and denial is spreading over a wider area, as people migrate from the poorer parts of Appalachia out into the larger Great Lakes region, bringing their problems with them. According to Vance, “Jackson’s plight has gone mainstream.”

Chapter 2

Vance’s Papaw and Mamaw both came from families with proud reputations in the often-violent culture of the Jackson area. Soon after they married, however, they moved to Middletown, Ohio. Mamaw was fourteen and pregnant, Papaw was seventeen and able to work, and there were better jobs in steel-mill towns like Middletown than in the coal mines near Jackson. Papaw and Mamaw were part of a post-World War II wave of hillbilly migrants who settled in places such as Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan. The families they left behind expected them to stay in touch and visit often, which meant frequent long car trips back to the hills. Meanwhile, the established locals looked down on the new arrivals with their many children and their odd habits. In Middletown, a friend of Papaw and Mamaw’s got into trouble by slaughtering chickens in his front yard. Papaw and Mamaw themselves once had a violent, merchandise-throwing confrontation with a pharmacy clerk. The hillbilly migrants believed in hard work, however, and their economic circumstances steadily improved. Papaw and Mamaw believed that their children were getting a head start on a better life.

Chapter 3

Jimmy was Papaw and Mamaw’s oldest child by ten years. After many miscarriages, Mamaw gave birth to Bev, and then Lori less than two years later. Outwardly, the family’s life was middle-class, but privately Papaw became an alcoholic. When Mamaw’s brothers came to visit, Papaw would go drinking and womanizing with them. When the family was alone and Papaw was drunk, he was violent. Mamaw retaliated creatively. She would cut Papaw’s pants to make them burst at the seams. She served him fresh garbage as dinner. One night she set Papaw on fire as he slept. One of the girls quickly smothered the flames.

The family conflict took its toll on the children, who all left home as soon as they could. Jimmy went on to a successful career, but Lori and Bev ended up in troubled marriages of their own. Eventually, Papaw quietly quit drinking, and although he and Mamaw separated, they remained close and began making up for their bad parenting. After they helped Lori—“Aunt Wee,” as J.D. called her—get out of her bad marriage, she remarried happily and worked in radiology. Bev was less successful. Papaw and Mamaw paid her nursing school costs, they supported her through rehab, and when she neglected her two children—Lindsay and J.D.—Papaw and Mamaw looked after them.

Chapter 4

When J.D. was born in 1984, Middletown was a thriving working-class community. During his boyhood, however, it began to decline. Poverty and crime rose, while falling property values made it hard for homeowners to relocate. Efforts to revitalize the once-bustling downtown shopping district failed. The causes of Middletown’s decline were largely economic. The town’s biggest employer was Armco, a steelmaker. When hard times hit, Armco survived by merging with the Kawasaki corporation, but it hired fewer workers than before. J.D. and his peers did not take notice, because they planned to be veterinarians, doctors, preachers, or businessmen when they grew up.

However, few in J.D.’s generation had realistic ideas about how to achieve their goals. The examples of the adults around them communicated that there was no shame in bad grades, and that being unemployed and on welfare was normal. It was widely assumed that success was a matter of luck or raw talent and had little to do with hard work—attitudes that the author believes persist in Middletown today. Papaw and Mamaw taught J.D. otherwise. They made sure he learned math, and they provided him with books and a library card. Mamaw checked on his grades. They insisted that he was going to go to college, and they worked with him to make that happen.

Chapter 5

Bev’s marriage to Lindsay’s father, her high-school boyfriend, did not last long. J.D.’s father, Bev’s second husband, left the family when J.D. was a toddler. Mamaw despised the third husband, Bob Hamel, essentially because he was a hillbilly like herself. However, Bob made good money driving a truck, and he treated Lindsay and J.D. kindly. Bev, who had just earned her nursing degree, taught J.D. about science, and Mamaw taught him the finer points of fistfighting. J.D. was happy. Things changed, however, when Bob and Bev moved thirty-five miles away to escape Mamaw and Papaw’s “interference.” They spend more money than they earned, and they fought constantly and with increasing violence.

Bob and Bev’s marriage ended after Bev had an affair. She and the kids returned to live near Mamaw and Papaw, but Bev began to stay out late, partying. She brought home a new boyfriend every few months. Her relationship with her kids became chaotic and confrontational. One day, as Bev was giving J.D. a roadside beating, he ran away and took refuge in a nearby house. He was rescued by police after the homeowner called 911. J.D. lied in court to protect his mother from a domestic violence conviction, but from then on, he lived with Mamaw and Papaw. Mamaw explained that if Bev had a problem with that arrangement, she could talk with Mamaw’s gun. This was how hillbilly families handled things. They did not need all those courtroom officials, with their accents like TV news anchors.

Chapter 6

Lindsay did her best to look after J.D. and be the “adult” in the household. What she and J.D. learned from watching their mother’s husbands and boyfriends come and go was that men can’t be counted on. When J.D. was eleven, Bev finally reconnected J.D. with his biological father, Don Bowman. According to Mamaw, Don had abandoned J.D., but Don described long efforts, with multiple lawyers involved, over custody of J.D. He had embraced fundamentalist Christianity. He gave up the legal battle only because it appeared that J.D. was suffering psychological harm, and only, Don said, after God confirmed through signs that the fight should end. Sociologists have observed that religious faith makes people happier and better adjusted, and this held true in Don’s case. He and his new wife were raising their children in a peaceful home in the country. However, as J.D. was drawn to Don’s faith and embraced it, he grew narrow in his views. He became suspicious of Catholics like Dan, Aunt Wee’s new husband, who accepted evolution. J.D. also began to worry that he might be gay. When he told Mamaw his fear, she assured him that even if he were gay, God would still love him.

Chapter 7

Papaw and Mamaw lived in separate homes after the separation, but they spent much of their day together at Mamaw’s. When he did not show up one day, the family rushed to his house and found him dead. Papaw was buried in Jackson. At the funeral service, J.D. described Papaw as the man who taught him the things men needed to know. After Papaw’s death, Bev’s mental health deteriorated, until one day she was standing out in her yard wearing only a towel, screaming obscenities at her latest boyfriend, named Matt, and others. She was dripping blood from her sliced wrists.

Bev had begun abusing prescription narcotics during the time away from Middletown, when her marriage with Bob was deteriorating. After she moved back to Middletown, her drug habit got her fired from her job at the hospital. After the crisis in the front yard, Bev entered rehab. With Mamaw also visibly under strain, J.D. stopped spending as much time at Mamaw’s place. Lindsay was increasingly forced to act as the responsible adult in the household. During family visits at the rehab center, Lindsay told Bev that Bev’s many short-term boyfriend relationships had a negative impact on J.D. In his mind, J.D. questioned the claim that addiction is a disease, no more the patient’s fault than cancer. However, he was supportive, and even went to group meetings with Bev after she completed rehab and returned home.

Chapter 8

Two years later, Bev had been sober for a year or more and was living with Matt in Dayton. Lindsay was married and starting a family of her own. J.D. divided his time between Bev’s and Mamaw’s homes during the week and stayed at Don’s on weekends. He was about to enter high school. Bev proposed that J.D. join her and Matt in Dayton full-time. J.D. refused and convinced a therapist that he should instead live full-time with Don. Life with Don’s family was peaceful and stable. However, J.D. was fond of things like the rock band Led Zeppelin and a card game called Magic. He did not trust that Don, with his strict religious views, would love and accept J.D. despite his tastes in music and games.

Eventually, J.D. asked to go back to live with Mamaw. To J.D.’s grateful surprise, Don understood. It soon become clear, however, that Mamaw was no longer strong enough to parent J.D. full time. J.D. agreed to live with Bev on the condition that he attend high school in Middletown (a long commute). Soon after, however, Bev announced that she and Matt were breaking up and she was marrying Ken, her boss at work. J.D. had to move again, into Ken’s home, to live with Ken’s children. J.D. was miserable. He did poorly in school, drank and tried marijuana, and felt distant from Lindsay and her family.

Chapter 9

One morning, when J.D. had stayed overnight at Mamaw’s, Bev showed up demanding a urine sample from J.D. She needed the urine to pass a drug test and keep her nursing license. J.D. had to confess to Mamaw that he did not think his urine would pass, either. After she assured him that his minimal marijuana use would not trigger a positive result, he reluctantly gave Bev some urine. However, Mamaw saw that J.D. needed to get away from Bev and insisted that he move back with her, full-time. The two of them would have to make the arrangement work.

J.D. spent the rest of his high school years with Mamaw. She bought him a calculator for his honors math class and demanded that he apply himself at school. She also insisted he get a job at Dillman’s, a local grocery store, so he could learn the value of a dollar. During those years living at Mamaw’s and working at Dillman’s, J.D. observed Mamaw’s neighbors and the store customers. He saw irresponsible spending, chaotic relationships, poor school performance, unwillingness to work, and refusal to take personal responsibility. These problems, Vance writes, cannot be solved by food stamps and housing subsidies—and those government programs sometimes make the problems worse. What a young person needs most, to succeed in life, is simple stability. That is what Mamaw gave J.D. when she took him in.

Chapter 10

J.D.’s stable living situation and improved school performance brought him into contact with new friends. Since they all planned to go to college, J.D. did, too. However, with his school performance improving but still not solid, he felt unready. Instead, he joined the Marines, over Mamaw’s fierce objections. Letters from his family sustained him through boot camp. When he returned to Middletown, people treated him with new respect. He took great satisfaction in helping Mamaw keep up the payments on her health insurance, and he was at her bedside when she died of a collapsed lung. During the drive to the cemetery, Lindsay and J.D.’s fond reminiscences of Mamaw were interrupted by Bev’s demand that they focus instead on her grief at losing her mother. Lindsay ended the conversation by replying that Mamaw had been their mom, too.

J. D. Vance served in Iraq and then finished the rest of his time in the Marines uneventfully. He had learned to be grateful for the good things life gave him, instead of always being angry. He had learned how to live like an adult—how to eat right and stay fit, how work with others from different backgrounds, how to lead, how to rebound from failure, how to handle unexpected challenges and accept constructive criticism. The Marine Corps had taught him that a person’s choices matter. That fall, he started classes at Ohio State.

Chapter 11

At Ohio State, Vance worked two jobs to support himself. His drive to succeed sustained him, even though he drank, ate poorly, slept little, and mismanaged his money. His mother and Aunt Lori cared for him when he came down with mono and a staph infection. After listening to a classmate speak contemptuously about American soldiers in Iraq, Vance decided to finish college and move on to law school as quickly as possible. He increased his class load and graduated summa cum laude in just under two years.

Looking back on that time, Vance is grateful to live in a country where someone like him can come so far. It troubles him that significant percentages of white conservatives could believe Barack Obama to be foreign-born or a Muslim, or could believe that the 9/11 attacks or the Newtown massacre were staged by the federal government. Such misguided thinking cannot be explained by media misinformation alone. It springs from a loss of faith in America, a pervasive skepticism about everything from the evening news, politicians, and universities to the prospects of employment in a depressed economy. When Vance encountered this outlook in his family and friends, while spending the year after graduation back in Middletown, he realized that his optimism had made him an outsider.

Chapter 12

Vance applied at several top law schools and was accepted by his first choice, Yale. He benefited from generous need-based financial aid, which for low-income students typically makes private Ivy League schools more affordable than less-selective public universities. At Yale, Vance was awed by the people he ran into, and by the campus’s architecture and history. He was able to keep pace with his classmates academically and enjoyed their company, and he even impressed a snobbish professor with his writing.

Vance felt out of place at Yale, however. Conversations with other students, about parents’ professions and about their own future incomes, reminded him that Yale was a different world from Middletown. Vance did not mind that his professors and classmates found him intriguing: a tall former marine with a Southern twang, at Yale law school. However, when fellow students became friends, it took him a while to share the more embarrassing aspects of his background. At the same time, back in Middletown, his loyalty to the people there made him reluctant to tell anyone, even a stranger, that he attended Yale. Vance had discovered the downside of upwardly mobility. It means not only movement toward a better life, but also movement away from the culture one grew up in. Vance felt torn.

Chapter 13

For his first major writing assignment, Vance was assigned a female classmate, Usha, as his writing partner. Soon they were dating. She was Vance’s guide about the finer points of law school life and culture, and about matters like dinner etiquette. His professors helped him, too. One of them vouched for him to a prospective employer after a disastrous interview. Another professor, Amy Chua, explained to him that the value of acceptance to the law journal depends on one’s career plans afterward. She also counseled Vance to steer clear of a clerkship with a particular judge, because he was notoriously demanding, and working for him would put Vance’s relationship with Usha at risk.

Hillbilly Elegy Sparknotes Chapter 1

Vance and Usha ended up clerking together elsewhere and then married. All the advice and help Vance received, from well-informed and well-placed friends and mentors, illustrates the concept of social capital: a set of social connections with economic value. For anyone seeking a successful career, Vance observes, lack of social capital is a serious handicap. Vance arrived at Yale with very little social capital. His success at Yale and afterward was made possible by the people who helped him along the way.

Chapter 14

At the start of his second year of law school, Vance was feeling good about himself and his situation. He had risen beyond his family origins. His relationship with Usha suffered, however, from his inability to navigate conflict. He did not want to scream at her, but the only alternative he knew was to withdraw. Usha and her family, he could see, dealt with conflict rationally and empathetically. At the library, Vance found studies about the long-term effects of “adverse childhood experiences,” or ACEs, such as being physically or verbally abused, or being the child of substance abusers or separated or divorced parents. Frequent ACEs in childhood produce a hyperreactive fight-or-flight response in adulthood. Vance realized that he had not left his origins behind at all. He was acting like his mother and others in his family, in ways that are normal in hillbilly culture. It was no accident, he thought, that the happy marriages in his family all involved husbands from outside the culture.

Vance began to see his mother more sympathetically, as a victim of a complicated mix of her upbringing and her own bad choices. When he learned that she was in rehab for heroin addiction and would miss his graduation, he was grateful that at least she was, for now, sober.

Chapter 15

After Vance graduated, and shortly after he got married, Bev relapsed. When she stole from her fifth husband to pay for drugs, he kicked her out. Vance had to drive back to Middleton and put her up in a motel. Her nursing career was a thing of the past. He has come to terms with his relationship with his mother. He helps her as time and money allow, but no more. He does not believe that “solutions” to the problems of people like his mother exist. He does believe there is room to put a “thumb on the scale” to tip the odds more in people’s favor, especially during childhood. Thumbs on the scale take many forms, starting with stable families, and mentors and role models to show children what is possible in life. Vance believes that government can help by being more tolerant of informal, multigenerational family arrangements, and less quick to place children in foster homes—and that housing subsidies should avoid concentrating families together in poverty enclaves. But some problems are beyond the reach of government. Vance had to learn for himself that academic achievement is not just for girls, that money will not disappear if one puts it away as savings, and that the proper adult response to an insult is to walk away.

Conclusion

Hillbilly Elegy Sparknotes Chapter 6

Hillbilly Elegy Sparknotes Chapter 9

When Vance was a boy, Christmas was a time for parents to spend more than they could afford. Only the nicest gifts would do, often paid for with borrowed money. Strangely, he later noticed, better-off families were content with more modest gifts. The value of Christmas was not measured in dollars. Not long ago, Vance took a kid named Brian to lunch, a fifteen-year-old from Appalachia who clearly was not getting enough to eat. His relationship with his father was complicated. His mother was a drug user who died soon after. If Brian is to have a chance at a normal life, Vance writes, his community must rally to give him that chance, instead of blaming their problems on the government or faceless corporations.