Hillbilly Elegy Summary

Hillbilly Elegy Summary 

Hillbilly Elegy by J. D. Vance

Setting

The novel is set in Middletown, Ohio

Main Characters

J.D. Vance – is the author and narrator of Hillbilly Elegy.

Mamaw – she is Vance’s grandmother and Bev’s mother.

Papaw – he is Vance’s grandfather and Bev’s father.

Bev Vance – she is J.D.’s mother and the daughter of Mamaw and Papaw.

Lindsay – she is Bev’s daughter and J.D.’s half-sister, though he considers her a full sibling, considering the fact that they are so close.

Aunt Wee (Lori Vance) – she is J.D.’s aunt and Bev’s younger sister.

Uncle Jimmy – he is J.D.’s uncle and Bev’s older brother.

Usha – she is J.D.’s wife, formerly one of his fellow students at Yale Law School.

Bob Hamel – he is One of Bev’s husbands, who she married after divorcing Don Bowman.

Don Bowman – he is J.D.’s biological father.

Uncle Pet – he is one of Mamaw’s brothers,

Big Red – he is a truck driver who, while making a delivery, told Uncle Pet, "Off-load this now, you son of a bitch.”

Amy Chua – is a professor at Yale Law School.

Matt – he is one of Bev’s boyfriends, who she dated when J.D. was thirteen.

Ken – he is Bev’s boss at a dialysis center.

Brian – he is A teenager from Kentucky who reminds Vance of himself as a fifteen-year-old.

Plot Summary

J.D. Vance begins his memoir by explaining that he is not a politician or an academic. He is simply somebody who grew up in Appalachia’s working-class and who found a way to achieve upward mobility against the statistical odds, which indicated that he would, as the grandson of hillbillies and the son of a drug addict, fail to graduate high school and likely succumb to drug addiction and domestic violence. His remarkable ability to avoid this fate, though, is not the reason he wrote Hillbilly Elegy. Rather, he wrote the book so that people could "understand what happens in the lives of the poor and the psychological impact that spiritual and material poverty has on their children.”

Vance explains Hillbillies descend from Scots-Irish Americans, who migrated to the United States from Scotland in the 18th and 19th centuries. For this group of people, "poverty is the family tradition,” and hardly anybody earns a college degree. Like Vance’s relatives, many Scots-Irish Americans live in the hills of Kentucky. Although Vance himself spent most of his childhood in Middletown, Ohio, where many hillbilly families migrated in order to work at Armco Steel, a generous employer of formally uneducated workers, he identifies Jackson, Kentucky as his true home.

This is because his grandparents, Mamaw and Papaw, spent the majority of their lives in Jackson. Family lore revolves around the town, and Vance illustrates the importance of the hillbilly oral storytelling tradition. He writes about his great-uncles, Mamaw’s brothers who he idolized as a child. They used to sit around and tell him spectacular tales. These stories were hardly appropriate for a child, but Vance revealed in the "hillbilly justice” each narrative advanced. In fact, the oral storytelling tradition often emphasized the hillbilly community’s strong values: loyalty and honor. Vance’s Uncle Pet, for example, once told a story about a man named Big Red who insulted his mother. After warning Big Red to retract his words, Uncle Pet beat him unconscious and ran an electric saw up and down his body. Big Red survived, but he never pressed charges because "he knew what it meant to insult a man’s mother.”

Having outlined the importance of honor and loyalty in hillbilly culture, Vance enumerates the many troubles plaguing Kentucky and the greater region of Appalachia. Drug addiction runs rampant throughout the working-class community, especially now, along with the dietary trappings of unhealthy lifestyles that depend on fast food and sugary sodas. Seeking a better life, Vance’s grandparents moved from Kentucky to Ohio, where Papaw took a job at Armco Steel. They had married as teenagers in Kentucky in 1947, two members of well-known hillbilly families. The young couple moved to Ohio because Papaw’s only other option was to work in the Kentucky coal mines, a prospect that would bring his family little in the way of satisfaction or stability. Mamaw and Papaw had three children: Vance’s Uncle Jimmy, his Aunt Wee, and his mother, Bev.

Unfortunately, Papaw had a serious drinking problem, an issue Mamaw met with intense scorn. She refused to allow her husband to continue his boozy lifestyle, and after many arguments, which included displays of domestic violence on both sides, she warned Papaw that she would murder him if he comes home drunk again. When he ignored her several nights later, she poured gasoline on him while he slept on the couch and lit him on fire. Luckily, Aunt Wee, who was eleven at the time, sprang to life and put the fire out. Papaw finally quit drinking years later, and although he and Mamaw separated and decided to live in different houses, they continued to spend all of their time with one another.

Vance asserts that children who witness the kind of domestic discord Mamaw and Papaw were involved in are statistically more likely to lead difficult lives themselves. Uncle Jimmy and Aunt Wee, though, managed to make it out of childhood to establish stable lives. Unfortunately, Bev succumbed to the statistical odds and embarked on a life of drug addiction and unstable romantic partnerships. She gave birth to Vance during her second marriage, which disintegrated not long afterward. Her next husband, Bob Hamel, adopted Vance and was a relatively kind man, and the family achieved something like stability for a small stretch of time, during which J.D. attended school and developed a love for reading. Despite her many flaws, Vance admits that his mother "believed deeply in the promise of education” and worked to instill this belief in her children.

Mamaw and Papaw figured greatly into Vance’s life since they lived in a nearby house. This relatively calm period came to a close, though, when Bev and Bob decided to move away from Middletown because they felt like Mamaw and Papaw were encroaching upon their autonomy. Vance was devastated to lose easy access to his grandparents whom he considered his best friends and, to make matters worse, the move brought with it the first domestic disputes of Bev and Bob’s marriage. Because Bev had inherited Mamaw’s characteristic temper, she never backed down from a fight. Vance notes that his mother’s arguments with his stepfather were his first model of how to go about solving marital disagreements, a process that often involved throwing plates and screaming at one another. As a result of the turmoil he witnessed in his private life, he began to do poorly in school, staying up late and listening with his sister Lindsay to Bob and Bev’s arguments.

One day, Vance returned from school to find that Mamaw had paid an unexpected visit. She’d come because Vance’s mother had attempted to commit suicide after a particularly raucous argument with Bob, who had apparently discovered that she was having an affair and subsequently demanded a divorce. Although Bev drove her car headlong into a telephone pole, she managed to survive. Mamaw doubted her daughter’s intentions, believing that Bev had tried to make it look as if she wanted to die in order to win sympathy and take everybody’s attention off of her affair. In the aftermath of this fiasco, J.D., Lindsay, and their mother moved back to Middletown, where they lived in a home that was even closer to Mamaw and Papaw’s than before. During this period, Bev went into a downward spiral of irresponsible behavior and started dating men who never stayed around for very long.

Themes

1. The Hillbilly Identity. Having grown up in a working-class Ohio town primarily populated by emigrants from the hills of Eastern Kentucky, J.D. Vance makes an effort in Hillbilly Elegy to clarify what it means to be a "hillbilly.” Including himself in this demographic, he explains that hillbillies are white Americans of Scots-Irish descent for whom "poverty is the family tradition.” For generations, they have been uneducated laborers fiercely dedicated to their own communities and traditions and remarkably resistant to change. And despite the poverty and social isolation they live in, hillbillies are proud of their culture.
2. Politics and the Economy. Vance considers politics and the economy in Hillbilly Elegy for two reasons. The first is to accurately depict the circumstances that lead to Appalachian poverty and hillbilly disenfranchisement. The second is to examine what can be done to address these difficulties. Regarding the latter, Vance believes that what the hillbilly community faces is primarily a social problem rather than a governmental problem, and he believes the dilemma ought to be handled as such.