Ever since former President Donald Trump selected Ohio Sen. JD Vance as his running mate, there’s been renewed interest in Vance’s best-selling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.”
The book was released to wide acclaim in 2016, with many journalists praising it for what seemed to them like an honest accounting of what it’s like to experience poverty in rural and Rust Belt parts of the country. The book was later adapted into an Oscar-nominated film.
Since Vance’s nomination for vice president, he’s leaned into the reputation he gained from the book as an ambassador for downtrodden Americans in those regions. But Alissa Quart isn’t so sure Vance is a reliable narrator.
Quart is the author of "Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream," a book that frames poverty as a systemic inequality issue rather than a personal crisis that can be overcome through sheer grit and gumption. And as Quart told The Show, the most telling scene in "Hillbilly Elegy" is the one where Vance gets invited to a fancy law school dinner and panics because he doesn’t know which fork to use.
Full conversation
ALISSA QUART: Because it was kind of a class anxiety, he's worrying about being judged by his fellow students and he's up against what he doesn't know about upper-middle-class and upper-class manners. And he wants it both ways.
He'll say things like “poor people are my people”, he said that in an interview. But then, he has all this contempt. So he, he says things about people who are, you know, from the holler, you have to stop making excuses and take responsibility and that is the mark of somebody who is all about where he's going rather than where he's been.
SAM DINGMAN: Yeah. Well, and it assumes that anybody who lives in a place like the one that he decided to leave, wants the same things as him, rather than to stay. And one of the things that you write about in the piece I read of yours on LitHub is that there are a great many writers about the Rust Belt and Appalachia and the, the working class more broadly who are doing so from those places, and that they're writing about the experience of living in environments like that is very different than JD Vance's. So, tell us what you see as the differences between the kind of writing that emerges from those places than writing like Vance's, which sort of, looks back in anger, so to speak.
QUART: Oh, yeah, completely. ... I divided into two categories. One is the “working-class traitor,” which is very much the Vance thing. And the other kind is the “class defector.” And that's, those are people who leave their working class backgrounds. I'm thinking of a book like "Mill Town" by Kerri Arsenault. These kind of books, they, the class defector changes their life and lives and goes to these, you know, nice colleges and becomes like a literary figure.
But there's a lot of, kind of love for where they came from and also a critical perspective on the equivalent of the Ivy League that they wind up in. And I think that's one of the things that's strange to me about JD Vance's version of the world, that he doesn't seem to understand systemic poverty at all, so he doesn't have any forgiveness for the people that he lived amongst.
But he also doesn't have any critical vision of the Peter Thiel, this wealthy Silicon Valley billionaire who's libertarian that he is his mentor, but those people are blameless. And there's a long tradition behind this. I mean, so like a lot of the classics of American literature had this ideology. And in my book, I talk a lot about the lies that are underneath it, the ways in which all these different people actually received help, including JD Vance.
DINGMAN: Yes. Well, one of the places that JD Vance got help from is the press. And as you write in this way, “Vance is our monster.” So, tell me a little bit about what you mean by that?
QUART: Well, Yeah, I mean, I think Vance's story flatters in a certain way. Liberal critics. It soothes class, privileged liberals because you read it and you think, you know, “This is a rags to riches story, this is, there's authenticity and realness.” A lot of, you know, at this point, something like 73% of our journalists and critics are on the coasts and that's the majority. And so they are open to this kind of fetishistic version of real American poverty.
That's something out of the 1970s film "Deliverance." And the fact that, you know, Vance keeps telling us that the people who don't make it out aren't trying hard enough is soothing because poverty is, is made into a, a form of immorality in American culture. And I think there is a problem with the press, that we have a press that's so privileged in a certain way, educationally privileged in particular, that they don't really understand what this world is like. So they're willing to sort of buy into these accounts. Another funny phrase, somebody used “poor-nography” to describe JD, right?
DINGMAN: Well, one of the things that makes me think about is and tell me if you agree when “Hillbilly Elegy” came out much of the coverage from what you have called the progressive culture makers who were kind of like reviewing and elevating this book is that there was such a rush at the time amongst mainstream media outlets to understand like, “but who are these Trump voter people? Like, how could this have happened?” And that much of the evaluation of “Hillbilly Elegy,” it seemed to me, was about making themselves feel better for now knowing who those people were according to JD Vance, rather than making an effort to actually understand their perspective via a messenger, other than somebody who, as you were pointing out seems to have a good bit of contempt for that world and in fact, left it far behind.
QUART: Yeah, I mean, I think it's a cartoonish version, right? And that's, that's comforting unto itself. You know, you don't really have to get to know it. I mean, one thing that I was thinking though is that I do think that there is a degree of trauma in JD Vance's account of where he's from. ... He did have a hard time and clearly had to separate himself from it.
DINGMAN: Well, no, I mean, you know, we are talking about the victim of pretty severe abuse. I don't think that it's irresponsible to use the word trauma to describe the environment that he grew up in. I mean, he was physically abused and psychologically abused by somebody who clearly was dealing with their own demons, in the form of his mom.
QUART: And I don't mean to get into his head like a, you know, armchair psychiatrist, but it, it's a kind of human self-protective impulse, I think, to protect, you know, the dry land that you're on and then you can sort of point fingers at people who are more vulnerable.
DINGMAN: Yeah. Well, as a note to close on one of my favorite parts of, again, that interview with you that I read is, you said, “it's really too bad that “Hillbilly Elegy” wasn't turned into something like adaptation. Could you imagine if there was a meta version? How much better would it be if Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman made a version of “Hillbilly Elegy?” And I could not help wondering how far you have taken that fantasy in your mind.
QUART: Yeah. Well, so this is the thing, Ron Howard, right? From "Happy Days," like the most all American filmmaker, right, takes the movie version of “Hillbilly Elegy,” which was a total flop and, but it cast like, you know, Glenn Close, like all these incredible A-list actors. But it was taken totally straight and these people, you know, actors left their Tribeca and, you know, westside LA apartments to put on a wig and pretend to be mamaw, right?
But I was like, “What if they had a desperate screenwriter trying to imagine himself into Ohio and into Kentucky?” Like in a way that would be more accurate, that would be ver that would be look at the honest to God, that was what, you know, Ron Howard, leaving his, you know, meeting with a cappuccino trying to figure out how to do a movie about Appalachia. So, anyway ... that is my fantasy.
DINGMAN: OK. I really hope that happens.
