Was J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy Really a True Story? All About the VP Candidate's Controversial Memoir

With the news that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has tapped Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as his vice-presidential running mate, the senator’s 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis is back in the news.

The memoir is 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.” While it hit No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list and was later adapted into a Ron Howard-directed Netflix film starring Amy Adams and Glenn Close, many critics — particularly those who live in or hail from Appalachia — questioned the accuracy of some of its claims. 

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

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“We spend our way to the poorhouse,” Vance writes in the book. “We buy giant TVs and iPads. Our children wear nice clothes thanks to high-interest credit cards and payday loans. We purchase homes we don’t need, refinance them for more spending money and declare bankruptcy, often leaving them full of garbage in our wake. Thrift is inimical to our being.”

In his review 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 University told Southeast Ohio magazine 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 to Silas House, who talked to Politico about the book in 2020. House, an Appalachian author himself and the Appalachian Studies chair at Berea College in Kentucky, said he looks at Hillbilly Elegy as “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.”

“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 the “intentionally manipulative stories” in the book are so damaging because they offer generalizations that play into harmful stereotypes.

One scene in the book describes Vance’s uncles as “drunks who fight everybody and they beat their wives.” He also calls them “the embodiment of the Appalachian man.” But in House's view, that characterization was “deeply troubling" and more representative of the stereotypes perpetuated by the media than of actual Appalachian men. 

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.” 

According to Vulture's Sarah Jones, the book’s very title gave away its author's agenda: “Vance… is a hero by virtue of his escape. The deceased do not give elegies for themselves. Survivors do that. And so Vance can speak for the hillbilly because he no longer is one; because he went to Yale, the stereotype of the uncouth White reprobate no longer applies.”