Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

by J.D. Vance

We tend to overstate and to understate, to glorify the good and ignore the bad in ourselves.

it’s why I spent the first eighteen years of my life pretending that everything in the world was a problem except me.

Kind of boring, by some standards, but happy in a way you appreciate only when you understand the consequences of not being boring.

lack of knowledge and lack of intelligence were not the same. The former could be remedied with a little patience and a lot of hard work. And the latter? “Well, I guess you’re up shit creek without a paddle.”

Research does reveal a genetic disposition to substance abuse, but those who believe their addiction is a disease show less of an inclination to resist it.

Every two weeks, I’d get a small paycheck and notice the line where federal and state income taxes were deducted from my wages. At least as often, our drug-addict neighbor would buy T-bone steaks, which I was too poor to buy for myself but was forced by Uncle Sam to buy for someone else. This was my mind-set when I was seventeen, and though I’m far less angry today than I was then, it was my first indication that the policies of Mamaw’s “party of the working man”—the Democrats—weren’t all they were cracked up to be.

I’d curse our government for not helping enough, and then I’d wonder if, in its attempts to help, it actually made the problem worse.

our government encouraged social decay through the welfare state.

This was my world: a world of truly irrational behavior. We spend our way into the poorhouse. We buy giant TVs and iPads. Our children wear nice clothes thanks to high-interest credit cards and payday loans. We purchase homes we don’t need, refinance them for more spending money, and declare bankruptcy, often leaving them full of garbage in our wake. Thrift is inimical to our being. We spend to pretend that we’re upper-class. And when the dust clears—when bankruptcy hits or a family member bails us out of our stupidity—there’s nothing left over. Nothing for the kids’ college tuition, no investment to grow our wealth, no rainy-day fund if someone loses her job. We know we shouldn’t spend like this. Sometimes we beat ourselves up over it, but we do it anyway.

We choose not to work when we should be looking for jobs. Sometimes we’ll get a job, but it won’t last. We’ll get fired for tardiness, or for stealing merchandise and selling it on eBay, or for having a customer complain about the smell of alcohol on our breath, or for taking five thirty-minute restroom breaks per shift. We talk about the value of hard work but tell ourselves that the reason we’re not working is some perceived unfairness: Obama shut down the coal mines, or all the jobs went to the Chinese. These are the lies we tell ourselves to solve the cognitive dissonance—the broken connection between the world we see and the values we preach.

My grandparents embodied one type: old-fashioned, quietly faithful, self-reliant, hardworking. My mother and, increasingly, the entire neighborhood embodied another: consumerist, isolated, angry, distrustful.

Mamaw could preach about responsibility and hard work, about making something of myself and not making excuses. No pep talk or speech could show me how it felt to transition from seeking shelter to providing it. I had to learn that for myself, and once I did, there was no going back.

I don’t believe in transformative moments, as transformation is harder than a moment.

I’ve seen far too many people awash in a genuine desire to change only to lose their mettle when they realized just how difficult change actually is.

I learned that leadership depended far more on earning the respect of your subordinates than on bossing them around;

I’m not saying ability doesn’t matter. It certainly helps. But there’s something powerful about realizing that you’ve undersold yourself—that somehow your mind confused lack of effort for inability.

I lived in a country that allowed me to make the good choices

Social psychologists have shown that group belief is a powerful motivator in performance. When groups perceive that it’s in their interest to work hard and achieve things, members of that group outperform other similarly situated individuals. It’s obvious why: If you believe that hard work pays off, then you work hard; if you think it’s hard to get ahead even when you try, then why try at all?

His status in life is directly attributable to the choices he’s made, and his life will improve only through better decisions.

There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherents by the day.

A part of me had thought I’d finally be revealed as an intellectual fraud,

successful people are playing an entirely different game. They don’t flood the job market with résumés, hoping that some employer will grace them with an interview. They network.

social capital. It’s a professor’s term, but the concept is pretty simple: The networks of people and institutions around us have real economic value. They connect us to the right people, ensure that we have opportunities, and impart valuable information. Without them, we’re going it alone.

social capital is all around us. Those who tap into it and use it prosper. Those who don’t are running life’s race with a major handicap.

Not knowing things that many others do often has serious economic consequences.

I was, she said, a turtle. “Whenever something bad happens—even a hint of disagreement—you withdraw completely. It’s like you have a shell that you hide in.”

The thought of fighting with her reduced me to a morass of the qualities I thought I hadn’t inherited from my family: stress, sadness, fear, anxiety. It was all there, and it was intense.

Nothing compares to the fear that you’re becoming the monster in your closet.

A sincere apology is a surrender, and when someone surrenders, you go in for the kill.

You can’t just cast aside family members because they seem uninterested in you. You’ve got to make the effort, because they’re family.”

Her marriage got even better, she said, only after she realized that she didn’t have to be on guard all the time.

Why do you fight with me like I’m your enemy?’” The answer is that, in our home, it was often difficult to tell friend from foe.

Disagreements were war, and you played to win the game.

In my worst moments, I convince myself that there is no exit, and no matter how much I fight old demons, they are as much an inheritance as my blue eyes and brown hair.

I had no demons, no character flaws, no problems. But that just wasn’t true.

My self-image was bitterness masquerading as arrogance.

As I increasingly saw Mom’s behavior in myself, I tried to understand her.

But I can’t fix everything, either. There is room now for both anger at Mom for the life she chooses and sympathy for the childhood she didn’t. There is room to help when I can, when finances and emotional reserves allow me to care in the way Mom needs. But there is also recognition of my own limitations and my willingness to separate myself from Mom when engagement means too little money to pay my own bills or too little patience left over for the people who matter most. That’s the uneasy truce I’ve struck with myself,

the real problem for so many of these kids is what happens (or doesn’t happen) at home.

another shitty card in an already abysmal hand, but there are many cards left to deal: whether his community empowers him with a sense that he can control his own destiny or encourages him to take refuge in resentment at forces beyond his control; whether he can access a church that teaches him lessons of Christian love, family, and purpose; whether those people who do step up to positively influence Brian find emotional and spiritual support from their neighbors.

These problems were not created by governments or corporations or anyone else. We created them, and only we can fix them.

A respected social scientist once told me that a book is like a baby. Eventually it leaves the house and you can’t control the way people interact with it.

To me, the fundamental question of our domestic politics over the next generation is how to continue to protect our society’s less fortunate while simultaneously enabling advancement and mobility for everyone. We can easily create a welfare state that accepts the fact of a permanent American underclass, one where family dysfunction, childhood trauma, cultural segregation, and hopelessness coexist with some basic measure of subsistence. Or we can do something considerably more difficult: reject the notion of a permanent American underclass.

Better policy requires better politics, however, and like many people, I find new reasons each day to wonder whether our politics are remotely up to the challenge.

it’s not enough to teach him the right lessons. I didn’t know these things because I read something that someone else had written down. I knew these things because I saw them with my own two eyes and felt them in my bones.