Hilbily Elegy
When J.D. Vance writes about growing up in the rust belt town of Middletown, Ohio, he’s not just telling his story – he’s excavating the cultural DNA of working-class America. Reading “Hillbilly Elegy” felt like peering through a window into a world that exists parallel to our coastal tech bubbles.
Vance’s description of learning to navigate elite spaces while carrying your working-class origins, resonates with anyone who’s had to learn the subtle choreography of class mobility.
He describes what he calls “learned helplessness” – the way persistent poverty creates a kind of gravitational pull, making it harder for each successive generation to escape its orbit. I see parallels here with the concept of “path dependency” in product development – how early decisions and patterns can constrain future possibilities.
The most haunting aspects of Vance’s memoir are his descriptions of family dysfunction – the carousel of father figures, his mother’s addiction, the constant instability. Yet through this chaos, his grandmother Mamaw emerges as a force of stability, albeit an unconventional one. She’s profane, prone to threats of violence, but provides the consistent presence that allows Vance to eventually break free from generational patterns.
There’s a particular scene that stuck with me: Vance describing how he learned to decode high-end restaurant menus at Yale, feeling like an anthropologist studying a foreign culture. It reminded me of my own fumbling attempts to understand British social cues – the endless variations of “sorry” and their subtle contextual meanings. These moments of cultural translation are where Vance’s narrative shines brightest.
The book has attracted criticism for potentially reinforcing stereotypes about Appalachian culture or suggesting that poverty is primarily a cultural rather than structural problem. These are valid concerns.
What stays with me is Vance’s description of the “hillbilly” code of loyalty – how it can both sustain communities through hard times and trap people in destructive patterns. It’s a reminder that cultural traits aren’t simply good or bad, but adaptive responses to specific circumstances that can become maladaptive when contexts change.
