Was J.D. Vance'sHillbilly ElegyReally a True Story? All About the VP Candidate's Controversial Memoir

Mar. 15, 2025

Ohio Senator and author J.D. Vance (in May 2024) and the cover of his book ‘Hillbilly Elegy’.Photo:Stephanie Keith/Getty, Amazon

Stephanie Keith/Getty, Amazon

When PresidentDonald Trumptapped Ohio SenatorJ.D. Vanceas his vice-presidential running mate, the then-senator’s 2016 memoirHillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisiscame back into the news.

The memoir, billed as “the true story of what a social, regional and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck," continued to stoke interest when Trump and Vance won the 2024 Presidential election.

While it hit No. 1 on theNew York Timesbestseller list and was later adapted into aRon Howard-directed Netflix filmstarringAmy AdamsandGlenn Close, many critics — particularly those who live in or hail from Appalachia — questioned the accuracy of some of its claims.

“Elegyis little more than a list of myths about welfare queens repackaged as a primer on the White working class,” saida New Republic story, at the time. “Vance’s central argument is that hillbillies themselves are to blame for their troubles.”

J.D. Vance on Capitol Hill in April 2024.Andrew Harnik/Getty

Andrew Harnik/Getty

In hisreview of the film for the Associated Press, Jake Coyle noted that explanation was attractive to many readers, especially coming as it did during Trump’s first presidential campaign. “The 2016 book came at the moment many were searching for explanations for the political shift taking place across Appalachia and the Rust Belt," he wrote.

In another review of the film adaptation, Vulture writer Sarah Jones wrote, “The book is poverty porn wrapped in a right-wing message about the cultural pathologies of the region. In Vance’s Appalachia, poverty and immorality intertwine. Success happens to hardworking people, and structural explanations for poverty receive glancing attention when he chooses to mention them at all.”

“This region is huge, and there’s all kinds of people here; people of different classes, races, ethnicities, genders, etc.,” Dr. Anna Rachel Terman, professor of sociology of Appalachia, diversity in Appalachia and women in Appalachia at Ohio UniversitytoldSoutheast Ohiomagazine in 2020. “Distilling our understanding of the region down to one person’s story is problematic because that larger diversity is not reflected.”

But there’s more to the issue than its factual merit, according toSilas House, who talked toPoliticoabout the bookin 2020. House, an Appalachian author himself and theAppalachian Studies chairat Berea College in Kentucky, said he looks atHillbilly Elegyas “not a memoir but a treatise that traffics in ugly stereotypes and tropes, less a way to explain the political rise of Trump than the actual start of the political rise of Vance.”

Amazon

“I think that if it had just been a memoir, it would be a powerful piece of writing, and it would be his own proof,” he explained. “But the problem is, it is woven through with dog whistles about class and race, gender. And if your ears are attuned to those dog whistles, you know exactly what he’s saying. If you’re not, then it can read like a heartwarming rags-to-riches story.”

House also pointed out that what he calls the “intentionally manipulative stories” in the book are so damaging because they offer generalizations that play into harmful stereotypes.

Critics have also noted that Vance’s packaging of the memoir as “an Appalachian narrative” is a bit of a misnomer, because his family moved away from the Appalachian region two generations before Vance was born. “Lots of times in the book when he’s talking about Appalachia, it’s almost like he’s never been to Appalachia,” House pointed out. “This is a Rust Belt story, but Appalachian stories, Appalachian literature, is its own genre.”

“If you read the book, you realize that hardly any of it is set in Appalachia,” he added. “He’s saying, I guess, that generationally you can’t escape Appalachia, because here he is, his grandparents left there when they were very young, his mother never lived there, he never lived there, and suddenly, after the book came out, he’s on every news show as the representative of a region that he barely knows.”

source: people.com