Addiction, Abuse, Humility, and Hope: Marcello Recommends “Hillbilly Elegy” by J.D. Vance
After watching him in the Vice Presidential debate, J.D. Vance piqued my interest. Who was this guy? He was well-spoken, handsome, empathetic, intelligent, and endearing. I heard that he attended Yale law school and just assumed he had the typical upper-class Ivy League political pedigree that most folks from that world are born into and take advantage of. Boy was I wrong. He mentioned at some point about growing up poor with some less-than ideal family support. I thought he was the typical politician playing up an exaggerated narrative to elicit sympathy from voters. Boy was I wrong.
At its core, Vance’s memoir, (which he admits right off the bat that writing a memoir when you’re only 30 years old is absurd), Hillbilly Elegy, is a story about self preservation. How much can you take without giving up? How much can you help someone (even if it’s you’re own mother) before you realize that they are going to take you down on their sinking ship if you’re not careful? How do you show up for anything (school, The Marines, College, Law School) when you’ve been told for most of your life that you are fat, stupid, lazy, and not enough? How do you carry on when one of your biggest advocates, (albeit far from the ideal support system) passes on and you’re left to pretty much fend for yourself?
With jarring honesty, Vance shares his journey and his answers to all of these questions while weaving in and out of life lessons on the socio-economic culture of America’s working class, the price you can pay for putting “family first,” and why the expression “you are who you surround with” is some of the best advice you could ever follow.
My only disappointment with the book is that it ended! The story in the book ended in 2016 when he graduated law school, met his beautiful wife, and had a one year-old baby. He had JUST started to reap the benefits of all his hard work and somehow started his elevated political trajectory where he earned the position of America’s Vice President! I mean, come on! Give me the goods, Mr. Vance!!! I guess I’ll have to wait for Part 2. The fact that there’s a good chance he will be running for President in the near future makes his story even more fascinating.
Anywho, here are a few of my favorite excerpts:
1) It was pretty clear that there was some mysterious force at work, and I had just tapped into it for the first time. I’d always thought that when you need a job, you look online for job postings. And then you submit a dozen resumes. And then you hope that someone calls you back. If you’re lucky, maybe a friend puts your resume at the top of the pile. If you’re qualified for a very high-demand profession, like accounting, maybe the job search comes a bit easier. But the rules are basically the same.
The problem is, virtually everyone who plays by those rules fails. That week of interviews showed me that successful people are playing an entirely different game. They don’t flood the job market with resumes, hoping that some employer will grace them with an interview. They network. They email a friend of a friend to make sure their name gets the look it deserves. They have their uncles call old college buddies. They have their school’s career service office set up interviews months in advance on their behalf. They have parents tell them how to dress, what to say, and whom to schmooze.
That doesn’t mean the strength of your resume or interview performance is irrelevant. Those things certainly matter. But there is enormous value in what economists call social capital. It’s a professor’s term, but the concept is pretty simple: The networks of people and institutions around us have real economic value. They connect us to the right people, ensure that we have opportunities, and impart valuable information. Without them, we are going it alone.
…Social capital isn’t manifest only in someone connecting you to a friend or passing a resume to an old boss. It is also, or perhaps primarily, a measure of how much we learn through our friends, colleagues, and mentors. I didn’t know how to prioritize my options, and I didn’t know there were other, better paths for me. I learned those things through my network—specifically, a very generous professor.
2) One guy, I’ll call him Bob, joined the tile warehouse just a few months before I did. Bob was nineteen with a pregnant girlfriend. The manager kindly offered the girlfriend a clerical position answering phones. Both of them were terrible workers. The girlfriend missed about every third day of work and never gave advance notice. Though warned to change her habits repeatedly, the girlfriend lasted no more than a few months. Bob missed work about once a week, and he was chronically late. On top of that, he often took three or four daily bathroom breaks, each over half an hour. It became so bad that, by the end of my tenure, another employee and I made a game of it: We’d set a timer when he went to the bathroom and shout the major milestones through the warehouse— “Thirty five minutes!” “Forty five minutes!” “One hour!” Eventually, Bob, too was fired. When it happened, he lashed out at his manager: “How could you do this to me? Don’t you know I’ve got a pregnant girlfriend?” And he was not alone: At least two other people, including Bob’s cousin, lost their jobs or quit during my short time at the tile warehouse.
You can’t ignore stories like this when you talk about equal opportunity. Nobel-winning economists worry about the decline of the industrial Midwest and the hollowing out of the economic core of working whites. What they mean is that manufacturing jobs have gone overseas and middle-class jobs are harder to come by for people without college degrees. Fair enough— I worry about those things, too. But this book is about something else: what goes on in the lives of real people when the industrial economy goes south. It’s about reacting to bad circumstances in the worst way possible. It’s about culture that increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it.
3) Working as a cashier turned me into an amateur sociologist…As my job taught me a little more about America’s class divide, it also imbued me with a bit of resentment, directed toward both the wealthy and my own kind. The owners of Dillman’s were old fashioned, so they allowed people with good credit to run grocery tabs, some of which surpassed a thousand dollars. I knew that if any of my relatives walked in and ran up a bill of over a thousand dollars, they’d be asked to pay immediately. I hated the feeling that my boss counted my people as less trustworthy than those who took their groceries home in a Cadillac. But I got over it: One day I told myself I’ll have my own damn tab.
I also learned how people gamed the welfare system. They’d buy two dozen packs of soda with food stamps and then sell them at a discount for cash. They’d ring up their orders separately, buying food with food stamps, and beer, wine, and cigarettes with cash. They’d regularly go through the checkout line speaking on their cell phones. I could never understand why our lives felt like a struggle while those living off of government largess enjoy trinkets that I only dreamed about.
Mamaw listened intently to my experiences at Dillman‘s. We began to view much of our fellow working class with mistrust. Most of us were struggling to get by, but we made do, worked hard, and hoped for a better life. But a large minority was content to live off the dole. Every two weeks, I’d get a small paycheck and notice the line where federal and state income taxes were deducted from my wages. At least as often, our drug-addict neighbor would buy T-bone steaks, which I was too poor to buy for myself but was forced by Uncle Sam to buy for someone else. This was my mindset when I was seventeen, and though I’m far less angry today than I was then it was my first indication that the policies of Mamaw’s “party of the working man“—the Democrats— weren’t all they were cracked up to be.
4) Marine Corps boot camp is set up as a life-defining challenge. From the day you arrive, no one calls you by your first name. You’re not allowed to say “I” because you’re taught to mistrust your own individuality. Every question begins with “this recruit”— This recruit needs to use the head (bathroom); This recruit needs to visit the corpsman (the doctor). The few idiots who arrive at boot camp with Marine Corps tattoos are mercilessly berated. At every turn, recruits are reminded that they are worthless until they finish boot camp and earn the title “marine.” Our platoon started with eighty-three, and by the time we finished, sixty-nine remained. Those who dropped out— mostly for medical reasons— served to reinforce the worthiness of the challenge.
Every time the drill instructor screamed at me and I stood proudly; every time I thought I’d fall behind during a run and kept up; every time I learned to do something I thought, impossible, like climb the rope, I came a little closer to believing in myself. Psychologists call it “learned helplessness“ when a person believes, as I did during my youth, that the choices I made had no effect on the outcomes in my life. From Middletown’s world of small expectations to the constant chaos of our home, life had taught me that I had no control. Mamaw and Papaw had saved me from succumbing entirely to that notion, and the Marine Corps broke new ground. If I had learned helplessness at home, the Marines were teaching me learned willfulness.
If you’d like to order your copy of Hillbilly Elegy, click here
By the way, I watched the movie version of Hillbilly Elegy last night. It’s was far from the uplifting “Redneck Rocky” I was expecting. It went deeper into his abusive childhood and his mother’s addiction. It was pretty heavy. Vance, who teamed up with Ron Howard for the film, definitely made sure not to sugar coat his past. Like the book, they portrayed the sometimes good, but mostly bad and ugly family history. Although the hopeless sentiments were quite depressing at times, the authenticity and rawness Vance allowed to be shared made me respect him even more.
Cheers, -m