J.D. Vance & The (Overlooked) Scathing Reviews of "Hillbilly Elegy"
The 2016 memoir was praised in reviews from nearly everywhere. What did they get wrong? And did that lead Vance to being on the Trump ticket in November?
In April of 2018, J.D. Vance was invited to speak at the “Appalachian Studies Association conference” in Cincinnati, Ohio.
It seemed obvious to extend an invitation to Vance. He was still riding high from his 2016 best-selling book Hillbilly Elegy. The memoir was lauded everywhere from the New York Times to the Brookings Institution, which described it as a “raw, emotional portrait of growing up in and eventually out of a poor rural community riddled by drug addiction and instability.” The story follows Vance’s childhood between Ohio and Kentucky, where he is raised largely by his fiery and poor grandmother, “Mamaw,” because his mother is in-and-out of responsibility due to addiction issues. Vance eventually makes his way out of the working class and onto Yale Law School and Capitol Hill.
After the book’s success, he was heralded as an expert on poor white Americans. He became the spokesperson of this expansive group of poor Americans. And journalists and commentators used his narratives as a way to describe the appeal of Trump as he made his way into the White House.
So it was in this context that the ASA leaders invited America’s new poster-boy for Appalachia to the conference. On the last day of the conference, he joined a panel discussion called: “Are We Losing a Generation? Poverty and the Opioid Crisis in Rural and Urban Appalachia.”
But the near-unanimous praise that he received in the country’s largest newspapers wouldn’t carry over to the conference in Cincinnati. During the panel, protestors stood up and turned their backs. Some booed him, according to local reports, and others sang protest songs.
The driving force behind the protest was a group called YALL: Young Appalachian Leaders and Learners. They said that many of their members found it “painful” to learn that Vance was invited to speak on a topic that was personal to them. In a statement, they questioned why a “problematic celebrity figure” like Vance was invited at all:
“We believe that separating Vance from his memoir is not only impossible, but dangerous. The opinions and experiences espoused in his memoir are what he is an expert on and are the divergent views that ASA should be engaging.
The controversy couldn’t have been totally unforeseen. The same conference just the day before had organized a conversation on Appalachian migration called: “Don’t Cry for Us, JD Vance (Or, The News of Our Death Has Been Greatly Exaggerated).”
So what did the protestors in Cincinnati see that much of the national press had not? And did a best-selling book propel him to the V.P. position?
Here is a look at some of the more scathing reviews of Hillbilly Elegy.
Sarah Jones, a writer for the New Republic, wrote a piece called “J.D. Vance, the False Prophet of Blue America” in November 2016. Jones said she “grew up poor on the border of southwest Virginia and east Tennessee,” and believes that Vance is “ a flawed guide to this world.” She added that “there is a danger that Democrats are learning all the wrong lessons from the election.” Judging by current headlines like this: “Trump’s VP Pick Wrote a Bestselling Memoir. Rereading It Now Is Astonishing,” this 2016 analysis seems prescient.
Jones delves into the misguided reception from the Left that she sees coming out of Vance’s book:
There is a more sinister thesis at work here, one that dovetails with many liberal views of Appalachia and its problems. Vance assures readers that an emphasis on Appalachia’s economic insecurity is “incomplete” without a critical examination of its culture. His great takeaway from life in America’s underclass is: Pull up those bootstraps. Don’t question elites. Don’t ask if they erred by granting people mortgages and lines of credit they couldn’t afford to repay. Don’t call it what it is—corporate deception—or admit that it plunged this country into one of the worst economic crises it’s ever experienced.
No wonder Peter Thiel, the almost comically evil Silicon Valley libertarian, endorsed the book. (Vance also works for Thiel’s Mithril Capital Management.) The question is why so many liberals are doing the same.
Hillbilly Elegy was so disputed for its generalization of working-class Appalachians and so misguided on the economics of government handout programs (the book cites just 21 footnotes at the end) that an entire anthology was published with essays from academics.
Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll’s 2019 anthology “Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy” was “born out of frustration.” The editors wrote that it was "created in the explicit context of a postelection, post–Hillbilly Elegy moment” was meant to “push back against and complicate” the understandings of those that feel they “now understand Appalachia” having read Vance’s book.
The editors noted that there were many more voices, perspectives, and statistics that came from the region than Vance had suggested:
Hillbilly Elegy and Vance have been criticized by many within the Appalachian region and beyond as anti-intellectual, overly anecdotal, and attempting to revitalize widely discredited “culture of poverty” explanations for persistent inequities in the region. Regardless of their particular perspective on Vance, though, all the voices in this book stress that Appalachia is a far more diverse and complex place and identity than Hillbilly Elegy and the media’s interpretation of it imply or that the president tweets about.
They also identify a conundrum in the mainstream: that Vance is only seen as a legitimate voice for the white working-class because he made his way into the elite echelons of American society:
As some of our contributors stress, this end result is crucial to both the book’s appeal and his claims to hillbilly authenticity. Despite his hardscrabble beginnings, only his later success in the world of law and politics and the valuable personal connections he has made (with the likes of billionaire businessman and investor Peter Thiel and Yale University “tiger mom” Amy Chua) make him seem a legitimate “spokesperson for the white working class.” In other words, only in distancing himself from Appalachia and what he dubs “greater Appalachia” has Vance come to be seen as the “authentic” and “credible” voice of the region and the white working class.
One essay is written by Dwight B. Billings, a professor emeritus of sociology and Appalachian studies at the University of Kentucky. He says the idea of “Trumpalachia” is a “mythical realm” and critically argues against the idea that it is “the reddest of red state America.”
He spoke with one Democrat from Ohio who put it this way: "Vance’s sweeping stereotypes are shark bait for conservative policymakers. They feed into the mythology that the undeserving poor make bad choices and are to blame for their own poverty, so taxpayer money should not be wasted in programs to help lift people out of poverty.”
Lisa Pruitt, a professor at UC Davis Law School, pushed back on Hillbilly Elegy in this way: “I was put off by Vance’s singular focus on personal responsibility and use of his story to advance an agenda antagonistic to the social safety net. Many of Vance’s positions run contrary to my own scholarly work about the white working class and rural America.”
As the anthology notes, “many of us have not liked the way that Hillbilly Elegy has been used as a shorthand way to explain the Trump phenomenon. While it is frustrating to have one person speak for a place, it is worse to have so many people listen to that one person and assume that he’s right and representative of all of Appalachia… When coworkers in Maine or in-laws in Florida or even college friends in western Kentucky say that they now understand Appalachia because they have read Hillbilly Elegy, it strikes a nerve. We’ve been defined by so many journalists and filmmakers over the years who’ve briefly dropped in only to confirm what they already suspected, and we’re sick of it.”
On the brilliant podcast If Books Could Kill, hosts Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri explore what they call “airport books” the best-sellers propped up on stands “that captured our hearts and ruined our minds.” Among the books they review is Hillbilly Elegy.
The episode, first released in early 2023, looked back at Vance’s memoir just after he had been sworn into Congress as a U.S. Senator from Ohio. And they identify some of his shifting political stances.
One passage they pull out from the book is when J.D. Vance as a child questions whether he might be gay. Hobbes and Shamshiri call the passage a “fairly-open deception” where he uses an aside to “re-assure liberal readers that he’s on their level”:
I’ll never forget the time I convinced myself that I was gay. I was eight or nine, maybe younger, and I stumbled upon a broadcast by some fire-and-brimstone preacher. The man spoke about the evils of homosexuals, how they had infiltrated our society, and how they were all destined for hell absent some serious repenting. At the time, the only thing I knew about gay men was that they preferred men to women. This described me perfectly: I disliked girls, and my best friend in the world was my buddy Bill. Oh no, I’m going to hell. I broached this issue with Mamaw, confessing that I was gay and I was worried that I would burn in hell. She said, “Don’t be a fucking idiot, how would you know that you’re gay?” I explained my thought process. Mamaw chuckled and seemed to consider how she might explain to a boy my age. Finally she asked, “J.D., do you want to suck dicks?” I was flabbergasted. Why would someone want to do that? She repeated herself, and I said, “Of course not!” “Then,” she said, “you’re not gay. And even if you did want to suck dicks, that would be okay. God would still love you.” That settled the matter. Apparently I didn’t have to worry about being gay anymore. Now that I’m older, I recognize the profundity of her sentiment: Gay people, though unfamiliar, threatened nothing about Mamaw’s being. There were more important things for a Christian to worry about.
By the time Vance was selected to become Trump’s V.P. pick, however, some of the largest LGBTQ+ organizations had come out criticizing Vance’s statements and bills as anti-queer.
They point to a bill he introduced that would ban transition-related medical care to all minors nationally and another bill that would ban “X” genders on passports.
Vance has also called LGBTQ individuals “groomers” and said he opposes the Respect for Marriage Act. That bill ensures federal marriage protections for same-sex and interracial marriages.
What was clear to Hobbes and Shamshiri was that this book was written with political intentions. Though it came out six years before Vance would be elected to Congress and eight before he became Donald Trump’s running mate, his ambitions were clear.
They said Vance, like other political memoir writers, had to “lie about their own level of ambition… they have to present these entrances to elite institutions as something that just happens to you.”
They argue that from the Marines, where he served as a public relations specialist, to Yale Law school, to working for politicians in DC, Vance’s ambitions were veiled in Hillbilly Elegy:
“He’s acting as if he’s just taking a job so he can get by. But no. He’s climbing up the political ladder so that he could build up to this very moment when he’s publishing this book, trying to get popular so he can eventually run for office.”
But Vance’s shifting perspectives for political gains doesn’t stop at policy… and his reversal on President Trump, now his running mate, could be more evidence of that.
Vance wondered whether Trump would become “America’s Hitler.” He called him “reprehensible” and said he doesn’t care about the people he represents.
Around the time that his memoir was on the top of the best-sellers lists, Trump was heading to the White House. Vance called him a “cultural heroin” and “just another opioid” for Middle America. He said he’d never vote for him.
Less than a decade later, he’s at the top of the Republican ticket, running alongside him in perhaps the most consequential election in American History.
Neema Avashia, the author of Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place, is one of the region’s writers who has taken issue with Vance and is speaking up as he skyrockets to the top of American politics.
She questioned Vance’s backbone against his own motivations in an op-ed for The Guardian titled, “I’m from Appalachia. JD Vance doesn’t represent us – he only represents himself.”
I barely read 30 pages before I saw the book Hillbilly Elegy for what it was: a political platform masquerading as memoir. Before I saw JD Vance for what he was: an opportunist. One willing to double down on stereotypes, to paint the people of Appalachia with a culture of poverty brush, rather than be honest about the ways in which both electoral politics and industry have failed our region.
Here’s the thing: JD Vance doesn’t represent Appalachia. JD Vance only represents himself.
It’s easy to get caught up in a best-selling book without critically thinking of the implications. Of course, with hindsight, it’s easy to question the author’s motives. Whether or not Vance would have succeeded politically without this book is a question that will never be answered. And the hypothetical is further muddled by the way he has shifted his moral ground to gain the approval of Trump, who’s fealty system has taken hold of the Republican party. So who knows if more coverage of an Appalachian protest of a best-selling book would have changed the trajectory. Or whether Trump was more rigid in the way he accepted converts into his posse. Maybe it’s even on Hollywood and Netflix, who made a film off of Vance’s book.
As Matt Rogers, the host of Las Culturistas, questioned on TikTok: “had we given Amy Adams the Oscar for Arrival, she wouldn’t have done “Hillbilly Elegy,” which J.D. Vance wrote. And now he wouldn’t think that he’s like *somebody* and a good writer.”
A somebody he now is.