What I’ve always remembered most clearly from J.D. Vance’s bestselling memoir, 2016’s Hillbilly Elegy, is its scorching descriptions of the lies that the working-class rural white Americans he grew up among tell themselves. An account of his chaotic and often perilous upbringing among people with roots in Appalachia, and of his seemingly miraculous climb out of that morass and into Yale Law School, Vance’s book hit at the most opportune moment. Many middle-class Americans were reeling after the election of Donald Trump and wanted some insight into what had possessed people like Vance’s relatives and sometime neighbors to vote for him. (But not Vance himself, of course! In 2018 he wrote an afterword to Hillbilly Elegy noting that he’d voted third party in 2016.)
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