JD Vance's "Hillbilly Elegy" ignores the real Appalachian crisis it portrays
I started reading JD Vance's 2016 memoir "Hillbilly Elegy" on election day, 2020. I didn’t plan it this way. I’d been asked to review the film and I felt that I should read the book beforehand and Tuesday, November 3, 2020 is when the book arrived. Up until then, I had pointedly avoided reading Vance’s memoir, which is back in the news this week after Donald Trump named the now-senator from Ohio as his running mate. I didn’t need to read the book because I had my own experiences with the culture that Vance deemed to be “in crisis.” I was born and raised on top of Muddy Creek Mountain outside of Alderson, West Virginia, a town of less than a thousand people nestled into the Greenbrier River valley just southeast of the coalfields.
From the passionate response pieces that I had read, I was somewhat prepared for the eugenics-tinged genetic arguments that stain the text and the deeply clichéd tropes that strangle the film version, but I was not prepared for a stunningly major omission: the fact that though much of the 265 pages of the book and hour and 56 minutes of the movie are taken over by suicide attempts and domestic and substance abuse, neither one manages to grapple at all with mental health.
The ways in which each version of "Hillbilly Elegy" avoids this crucial topic are different, but both are tragically ill-advised. The book itself is a Frankenstein hybrid of looping, repetitive memoir chapters told almost entirely in a voice-over style summary (the creative writing teacher in me kept screaming give us something to see, smell, feel — any sensory detail at all, please!) sandwiched between slapdash social science commentary on the “lurking” “ethnic component.” Vance argues that the bad genes passed down through his Scots-Irish ancestors are the cause of the current social ills he is examining. He bases this argument almost entirely on a blog post from Discover magazine by a writer with a history of contributing to racist, far-right publications.
Even more surprising, many critics were duped by these deeply troubling genetic theories. It is one thing to call Vance a “Trump whisperer” and attempt to utilize his book as an answer for the vote, but it is something else entirely to take him on as a “fiercely astute social critic.” For all of his supposedly fierce astuteness, and all of his focus on hereditary genes, Vance somehow managed to never engage with the fact that his mother and grandmother both struggle with mental health issues that look very much like bipolar episodes.
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/jd-vances-hillbilly-elegy-ignores-130006300.html
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