Hillbilly Elegy:
A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis
By J. D. Vance
A Review by Dr. Dwight A. Moody
As I finished the last few pages of this 2016 bestseller, the television screen showed the author, the Vice President of the United States, sitting on a couch in the Oval Office as the President welcomed Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Among topics discussed were the sale of F-15 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia, the House of Representatives vote to release the Epstein files, and the murder of Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018.
In this way, I filtered all that Vance has written about his upbringing, his military service, and his education through that which he is a part of in this current administration. And all I can see is the enormous disconnect between the values he extols (as well as those he denigrates) in the book and those that characterize the federal policy for which he serves as a prime advocate.
There is a lot in the book about violence, in the home and family, and how he emerged to enjoy life in a home and family without violence; yet day by day, he is a public advocate for the violence we see in Gaza, during the ICE raids in Chicago and Charlotte, and on the open waters of the Caribbean Ocean. Either Vance has not learned enough about the destructive impact of violence, or the demands of his association with Donld J. Trump have taken him out of his moral comfort zones.
The emotional, verbal, and physical violence he describes as common in his home, and in the homes of all the other hillbillies who had relocated from Kentucky to Ohio, is stunning. He uses this narrative to paint the entire Appalachian region in dire and despicable ways. And I add my voice to so many natives of the region who have pushed back against this self-serving type-casting of the people of Eastern Kentucky. My mother was born in 1927 in Vanceburg, Kentucky, also in Appalachia half again as near to the famous U. S. Highway 23 Vance uses as the epicenter of the troubled region. But not a single element of Vance’s cultural description can be attached to my mother and her four siblings and their offspring, unto the third and fourth generation. And this could be said for thousands of others, including all the bright students who came to study in my classes at Georgetown College.
Yes, this is an amazing tale Vance spins in this book. It is extremely well-written. And I am impressed that Vance himself emerged from what he describes to complete four years as a Marine, earn a university degree, and graduate from Yale Law School. That, of course, is the intent of the book (apparently), to demonstrate how Vance went from the bottom to the top; and kept going. He, no doubt, hopes there is an addendum to this early-in-life autobiography, one that wows the world with how he becomes the President of the United States.
Others hope so as well. Like his friend Rod Dreher, who writes in a recent essay: “Vance is—or could—be the answer to the problem of … the nihilistic culture” of our country…. He knows all too well about the failures of American institutions” [from “J. D. Vance Versus the Groypers?” In The Free Press, Nov 12, 2025]. Yet it was precisely a series of American institutions that rescued Vance from all the described evils of his hillbilly ways: like the U. S. Marine Corp, and Ohio State University, and Yale Law School, plus a series of teachers, judges, and doctors (all imbedded in institutions), to name those chronicled in this book.
This same Dreher is quoted on the back cover of the book itself: “You cannot understand what’s happening now without first reading J. D. Vance.”
That is an odd assertion given how often Vice President Vance has had to distort the truth, obfuscate for an answer, and plead ignorance in response to the cascade of national and international disasters of the last nine months. Chief among these disasters are, of course, the effort by Vance and his buddies to strip millions of people of food money and medical insurance. Somehow, I would have expected somebody who has eloquently testified to the desperate need for such assistance during their upbringing to have more empathy for those he left behind. It surely makes us read this book in a very different light.
One thing this book does is chronicle the ugly and dysfunctional family in which Vance himself was raised. Late in the book, he also acknowledges how childhood trauma, so like that which Vance endured, tags a child for life and too often portends problems as an adult. A discerning person might expect such things from the J D Vance of 2030 and beyond. Yet, here he is, second in command to the person these same experts describe as a sociopath, a narcissist, and a serial liar. Can this give anyone confidence in the White House and its cronies? Can this help any of us sleep well and rise assured? I don’t think so, although Trump and Vance will tell us different.
There is something omitted from this book, and this omission is strange: religion! Hillbillies in Kentucky are religious people and churches of all kinds dot the hills and hollers. I once wrote a column in this newsletter about the End Time Tabernacle, somewhere west of Prestonsburg. Yet, religion and church appear to have been absent from his upbringing, even in once-removed Middletown, Ohio. Can this be? I don’t think he describes one event in a church setting, not one. And he mentions only in passing his gradual surrender of whatever undescribed faith he had. Yet, three years after publication, he is baptized into the Roman Catholic Church, another of those institutions that saved him. As a minister, a scholar, and a citizen as well as a careful reader of this book, I wonder how God and Jesus, grace and forgiveness, scripture and song figured into his life as a hillbilly.
Is he still a hillbilly? I don’t know, but time, and stress, and power just might open up a way for us to know. I will keep you posted.
