September memoir of the month: Hillbilly Elegy!
This memoir is an important one because it shows how much resilience is required to press forward when you are born into poverty. As Vance says in this book, poverty was ‘The Family Tradition.’ Welcome to life in the Appalachia.
The Appalachia is a setting I have always been interested to know more about. This is partly due to my great love for hiking and deep fascination with the Appalachian Trail, the nation’s longest marked hiking trail. The Appalachia spans across 13 states, including Vance’s hometown, Jackson, Kentucky. My intrigue for this part of the world really piqued after my friend took a trip here. Years back, my friend, who was working as a nurse at the time, embarked on an organized medical trip to Jackson, Kentucky. The team was going to bring much needed toiletries and provide free medical check ups and services to the locals.
When my friend arrived, she said the living conditions were more haunting than she could have predicted. Kids chugging mountain dew for lunch and missing half their teeth, the result of a daily diet of soda and candy bars. Since these kids didn’t know another way of life, they had developed a sense of pride (inherited from their parent’s mindset) about healthy food and hygiene. “I don’t want no fucking toothbrush,” a 5-year-old spat to my nurse friend.
As she described her weekend in Jackson, Kentucky, a community deprived of basic needs and ridden with poverty, Winters Bone in real life, it was all I could think about for months. I wondered how would a young child even know how to get out of a place like this or eventually learn (without an education) that a Snickers for every meal might destroy your teeth. Hillbilly Elegy became my answer to these questions. Unable to put this book down, these are 5 more crucial reasons why you should read this book!
5 Crucial Reasons To Read Hillbilly Elegy:
1. This book will educate you about important social topics.
Vance doesn’t only tell us a gripping story, but he educates us along the way. He informs us of the deep-rooted pride wound up in many of the men in this part of the world, a pride that runs so deep, young boys believe that going to school is a feminine endeavor only women should pursue. As a result, many young boys drop out of high school and never go to college. He informs us about the War on Drugs and how it contributed to a huge number of problems in the Appalachia, including crime and addicts. If these topics have ever interested you, Vance will enlighten you about what it looks like to be a kid, raised in the thick of them.
2. This book will reveal how hard it is for a person with a mental illness to get better when he or she lives in a low-income area.
Vance’s mother has bipolar disorder. Since health care and therapy aren’t options for her, over time her trauma + living in poverty, lead her down a dark path into addiction.
3. This book will remind you how important it is to show up for somebody, even if that’s all you havre to offer.
Vance’s father left. His mother is an addict. But his grandma shows up. She is dirt poor and crass but she shows up, and this makes the world of difference in the trajectory of Vance’s life.
4. This book will show you the impact the decline of blue-collar jobs has had on families.
Vance did not have an easy life. But he doesn’t beg you to feel sorry for him. Instead, he asks you to look at the poor white class of America and understand how many of them never even had a chance for a better life. It’s not that they don’t want to work. It’s that jobs are nearly impossible to find as the decline of blue-collar work continues to grow.
5. Hillbilly Elegy is a movie! It’s also one of the BEST memoir to cinema translations and depicts the MOST accurate portrayal of a woman living with bipolar disorder I’ve ever seen in the cinema!
Actors and screenwriters don’t always nail the art of writing or portraying a character with a mental health condition, but Amy Adams does. Her portrayal of Vance’s mom is so spot on to what living with a loved one with a mental health condition looks like, I actually felt as if I was watching one of my family members. Read this book, then watch Adams performance, and you will come to understand things about people with bipolar disorder you may have never understood before.
