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Notes -
The book tries to draw up something more complex -- his grandmother being his primary caregiver and if she had been a hellion in her youth she'd at least tempered with age; his biological father got enough religion to take enough responsibility to provide some anchoring force not long after; having moved or been moved from some of the more hillbilly areas -- but I think for the most part he didn't get out clean, so much as the space between clean and dirty is a gradient with a steep slope :
((This is also part of why I'd caution against operating solely from reviews. One person's take on a story won't be the same as the story. For another example, "Bob" in Vance's example ends up having a different set of problems than listed in the review, likely as a result of going offhand: he misses fewer days a week on average but spends much longer in restroom breaks, and dormin1111's "nearly physically assaulting the boss" is just "he lashed out" verbally in the original. Maybe they mean the same things, but they're not the same statements.))
There's a view where these aren't the Real Sins.
Vance had to lie to keep his biological mother out of jail (allegedly threatening him with vehicular murder-suicide at 12), but he always had a different house to fall back to. He had a crappy GPA, but never flunked out of a grade. He had to forge a parent's signature to keep from being found truant in a legally-fraught way, but he was never kicked out of a school. He fought, viciously, with not!family who didn't buy into the borderer culture and could have gotten arrested over, but he never was so violent that someone tried to have him charged over it. He drank and smoke pot, but he didn't get addicted to narcotics. His mother saw him as useful for little more than piss (literally, to pass a drug test), but his grandmother pressed him to keep a passing grade.
The view Vance is pushing -- whether or not he believes it -- is that there's a very narrow step from one side of that gradient to the other, and that while he never recognized the slope in his youth, he sees it now. It's pretty explicit:
((Though I think to an extent, Vance did benefit by having distractions. Hillbilly Eligy only mentions the TI 89 calculator and trading cards and television, but the man entered high school in 1998, and turned 18 several months after 9/11. It's quite possible that his version of 'acting out' was watching banned television shows, plinking with a BB gun, or passing around bootleg cassettes and nudie mags and beer and pot, because he had too many better things to do with his time: much of his worst behaviors were opportunistic. Similarly, modern-day borderers can kill someone three-dozen times for making fun of their mom, and then do it all again with laser swords-only: if it's in Halo the cops don't care. But sometimes that just puts off some of the issues.))
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