What is “Hillbilly Elegy” about?
For politicians, Capitol Hill is rarely the only career opportunity. Many elected officials have already made a name for themselves in the fields of business, economics, lobbying or technology before taking office.
Such is the case with JD Vance, Donald Trump’s recently announced vice presidential candidate. The Ohio Republican was first elected to the Senate in 2022 after defeating Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan, but before his time in Congress, he was best known as an author.
Here’s everything you need to know about Vance’s 2016 bestseller and its 2020 film adaptation.
JD Vance’s book: What is “Hillbilly Elegy” about?
Vance has written one book – his memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis,” was published by HarperCollins in 2016. He had a contract to write a second book, “A Relevant Faith: Searching for a Meaningful American Christianity,” but the project fell through, the Associated Press reported in 2022. He also wrote a foreword to “Reprogramming the American Dream: From Rural America to Silicon Valley – Making AI Serve Us All,” by Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott.
Hillbilly Elegy tells the story of a childhood marked by abuse, alcoholism and poverty. The film follows Vance’s white working-class family from his grandparents in the Appalachian region of Kentucky to his childhood in Middletown, Ohio. Vance also recounts his time in the Marines and his college education, touching on “upward generationalism” and “the demons of his messy family history.”
“I think of so much politics through the eyes of my Mamaw and Papaw … they grew up very poor and moved to southern Ohio because that was the land of opportunity,” he told a crowd in Delaware during his 2022 Senate run. “That was the place where a man could work hard and play by the rules and raise a family on a single middle-class income.”
Pundits began using his memoir to explain Trump’s popularity among white, rural voters in the 2016 election. The New York Times called it “a tough analysis of the poor who support Trump.” However, Vance openly criticized Trump in 2016, even suggesting he could be “America’s Hitler.” He changed his message as he prepared for his 2022 Senate run and secured a Trump endorsement in the Republican primary.
When Vance ran against Rep. Ryan, he already had the reputation of “Hillbilly Elegy” on his side. Many saw him as a politician who could identify with average Americans. But not all Appalachians felt represented in the narrative of white middle-class families.
A review in The Atlantic accuses the film and book of portraying poverty as a “moral failing of individuals” rather than the workings of a larger system: “Hillbilly Elegy must simplify the people and problems of Appalachia because it has chosen to tell the same old ‘get-up-on-your-own-power’ story that so many of us reject.”
Cast of the movie “Hillbilly Elegy”: Who played JD Vance in the film adaptation?
Ron Howard directed an adaptation of Vance’s memoir, which was released in select theaters and on Netflix in November 2020. In Hillbilly Elegy, Amy Adams plays his mother, Bev Vance, and Glenn Close plays his grandmother, Mamaw. Gabriel Basso plays JD Vance, and Owen Asztalos plays a younger version of him.
The film was not well received by critics—it received just 25% on Rotten Tomatoes—but Close was nominated for Best Supporting Actress at the 2020 Oscars for her role.
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