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Notes -
It's been a few years since I read it, but my impression of Hillbilly Elegy was that it was mediocre as a political polemic (mostly because the book was IMO too short to develop the many points it was trying to stab at, be it his political arguments or his personal story), but that Vance's personal story was very compelling. As someone who voted for the Trump/Vance ticket I was far more impressed with Senator Vance's growth through the 2024 campaign trail than the book, movie, or his Senate campaign.
With that, as someone whose background was "Hillbilly Elegy with the details shuffled and maybe a bit worse" I was not prepared for how much reading Vance's story would me down an emotionally ugly trip down memory lane that left me in tears asking God why we had to be like that.
My big reservation with the book is that I came away from it wondering if he was telling a story about Borderer honor culture or multiple generations of Borderline Personality Disorder in a family in a Borderer context. He mentioned having an ACE score of 7/10, and that is sufficiently severe/rare that I would strongly caution against generalizing about a cultural group (even/maybe especially your own) based on living through that.
I will say that I have a fairly critical view of "Borderer honor culture" because I experienced too much of its extreme, aka. the use of firearms in domestic arguments. That's just not okay. There is no circumstance in which it is acceptable to kill your daughter in a murder-suicide because your wife presented you with divorce papers. Shooting yourself dead in an argument with your girlfriend may well be the most dramatic way to make your point short of murder, but doing so makes you a piece of shit for what that does to her. Both of those things happened to close relatives of mine, and it's not okay. I blanched when the book mentioned his Mamaw (I had a chain-smoking Mamaw named Bonnie too.) lighting his grandfather on fire because that was something Mom would've done to us if it had occurred to her and it was fucking terrifying growing up under the thumb of a screaming, constantly threatening banshee. He captured the toxic push-pull dynamic of dependence and resentment between Mom and Mamaw perfectly.
Vance was right to say that his experience of interpersonal/familial relationships was so different from his wife Usha's that they might as well have been from a different planet. In my experience an ACE score of 7 comes with a bunch of fucked up stories that I now hesitate to tell because they're nuclear-level buzzkills in the typical "Millennial complain about your family" session and because I'm at a place in life where I'd rather not dwell on the shit I'm trying to move on from. If I were to write my own Hillbilly Elegy the cover would feature me sitting in a local reporter's car watching my house burn down and all my belongings with it two weeks before Christmas when it turns out that the fire was set by my mother for the insurance money.
On a side note, I wound up befriending a bunch of second-gen immigrants in high school/undergrad and for whatever reasons their first gen parents, be they Russian/Ukrainian or Indian, tended to instantly like me and trust me as a friend for their children who was capable of handling plebian tasks for them like changing a tire, putting out a fire, or teaching them basics like "how to fry an egg" or "how to do laundry". Likewise, as an undergrad I had certain professors who gave me a lot more leniency than I deserved or asked for (concerning turning in assignments late; writing apologetic emails for late assignments was something I developed into an art form as a student) because they perceived me as "not privileged" because I worked a full-time job as a student.
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