Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture

Vance spends a good deal of time detailing adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs, and notes that these experiences are common for kids with his background. Those who grow up in working-class households experience more ACEs than those who grow up in upper-class households (40%, compared to 29%). Vance tells of giving a test to Aunt Wee and Lindsay, who grew up under circumstances similar to Vance, and to Uncle Dan (Aunt Wee’s husband), and Usha. “I gave a quiz […] to measure the number of ACEs a person has faced. Aunt Wee scored a seven—higher even than Lindsay and me, who each scored a six. Dan and Usha—the two people whose families seemed nice to the point of oddity—each scored a zero. The weird people were the ones who hadn’t faced any childhood trauma” (227). This relates to the theme of The Appalachian Diaspora because even when people with Vance’s background succeed in the wider world, they often carry a greater level of trauma than their peers based on their cultural and socioeconomic upbringing.

Vance describes how his ACEs negatively affected his relationship with Usha. She notes that he’s a “turtle,” or someone who withdraws into his shell when anything bad happens. Due to Vance’s dysfunctional upbringing, he doesn’t know how to maintain a healthy relationship and admits that he displayed the same “hateful” behavior as his mother to deal with challenging emotions like fear, stress, guilt, and anxiety. He resents anything in himself that he considers weakness, such as poor performance on tests, because he doesn’t want to be a failure. Usha reassures him rather than abandoning him, which is what he expected, and he realizes that other families lack the violence and drama that he encountered growing up. His new resolve leads him to research his behavior and learn about ACEs.

Vance closes the book with data about single parents and income segregation. If one grows up in a single-parent household, lives in a poor neighborhood, and is poor, it is very unlikely that said individual will escape poverty. Vance does manage to escape the impoverished community in which he grew up, crediting the positive forces in his life—his sister, Mamaw, and Papaw—with allowing him to do this.

By contrast, his mother, who grew up in Mamaw and Papaw’s household when they were often fighting and when Papaw was always drunk, goes on to a life of addiction: alcohol and marijuana progress to prescription opioids, which progress to heroin. Homeless and without a job, Vance’s mom is more dependent than Vance was as a child, needing a young Vance to manage her finances, lie to the authorities, and make sure she has a roof over her head. This relates to the theme of Societal Laws Versus Family Loyalty. Since most of Vance’s young life was spent enabling his mother’s addictions to keep her out of trouble, he struggles to dissociate from her behavior as an adult. Since he learned to side with his family and distrust the wider world, he has difficulty using the public and social services that are available to people in his situation. One issue, he notes, is that state laws define family narrowly, whereas working-class families, including those in Black and Latino communities, define family more broadly. Separating children from their families because an available family member, like a grandparent or an aunt, isn’t a licensed caregiver—which the state requires foster parents to be—is detrimental. He notes that he benefitted from many social programs, but the real problems facing children in his situation lie at home.

He notes that another issue is the association of schoolwork and academic success with femininity, whereas masculine attributes are considered fighting and toughness. Growing up, he feared being called sexist or anti-LGBT slurs. He tries to remedy this behavior in adulthood and notes that these beliefs hold young men from his background back. He does not advocate for changing these outdated sexist views but emphasizes that, as an adult, he worked hard to rethink them.