Review of Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance

Reviewed by Steve

Like the author, J.D. Vance (yes, that guy!), I was also a Marine who escaped a dysfunctional family from a farm in northern Wisconsin to settle in California at the age of 21. However, instead of attending Yale Law School, I attended the UCLA Graduate School and earned a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology.

In 2016, when I read the book, I liked it and gave it a five-star rating on Amazon. Obviously, I like rags-to-riches personal stories.

J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy has been widely discussed, politicized, misunderstood, and weaponized. But when read closely and without the noise surrounding it, the book reveals itself as something quieter and more humane: a deeply personal account of growing up in a culture that is fraying under the weight of generational trauma and emotional inheritance. As someone who also rose from a working-class, rural, and dysfunctional background, I saw in Vance’s story something achingly familiar. His childhood is not unique; it is emblematic. And it is mine, too.

I admit I was initially reluctant to give the book a chance. The marketing language and the media fanfare suggested a simplistic culture-war narrative, and Vance’s interview with Megyn Kelly made me wary of polemics disguised as memoir. But the library copy I picked up proved me wrong. Though the book occasionally strays into unnecessary commentary, the memoir is grounded in lived experience, curiosity, compassion, and a willingness to examine the emotional costs of rising up and out.

What elevates Hillbilly Elegy is not its political framing but its moral one. Vance neither condemns nor romanticizes the Appalachian working poor. He simply shows them: their fierce loyalty, their self-sabotage, their pride, their violence, and their deep hunger for dignity. He is unsparing about generational pain, addiction, and cycles of learned helplessness—but he is equally unsparing about the strength and love that helped him endure.

His depiction of the Marines as a place where he learned discipline and self-belief resonated with me, though my own military service unfolded differently. I arrived physically tougher and prepared. I did not need structure. He arrived raw and in need of structure. Yet both of us joined for the same reason: escape. Escape from chaos, from emotional devastation, from the anxiety that the future would look just like the past.

The memoir also underscores a truth often ignored in American rags-to-riches mythology: no one climbs alone. Vance credits his grandmother and extended family for pushing him, encouraging him, and believing in him. I, too, owe my life to mentors I found in Los Angeles, who offered me the emotional and intellectual guidance I never received at home. Social mobility is not simply a matter of talent or willpower. It is about relationships, timing, and mercy.

If the memoir falters, it is in three minor detours that feel more like editorial impositions than essential narrative elements: a casual aside about gambling, an overly extended description of Yale networking rituals, and a defensive justification of U.S. military intervention abroad. These asides distract from the memoir’s emotional center and its most compelling argument: that trauma leaves residue that education, money, and upward social status cannot fully erase.

Vance ends the book with honesty rather than triumph. He acknowledges that the patterns learned in childhood—explosive anger, emotional guardedness, fear of intimacy—do not disappear simply because one escapes their setting. His marriage, like many of ours, requires unlearning, vulnerability, and ongoing work. This final admission, restrained and unresolved, is the memoir’s most powerful moment.

Despite the culture-war noise surrounding it, Hillbilly Elegy is not a political treatise. It is a coming-of-age story about the complex, lifelong work of breaking the emotional inheritance of poverty. It reminds us that the American Dream remains possible, though never universal, and always comes at a cost.

I give the book five stars not because it is flawless, but because it is honest, necessary, and deeply human. Little did I know that JD Vance would become a political figure in a way I had never predicted from his book or his 2016 TV interview, which was published long before he entered politics. What a change in the next ten years.

Closing Paragraph to Add

Vance’s story, in many ways, parallels the arc I explore in my own memoir. Though our geographies differ—his Appalachian Ohio and Kentucky, my rural northern Wisconsin farm—the emotional landscape is strikingly familiar: the quiet humiliation of older, uneducated Italian immigrants but hardworking parents, the terrible humiliation of a public flunking the 2nd grade, the longing to belong somewhere else, and the stubborn, almost irrational belief that life could be different. Like Vance, I left home through the Marines, found mentors who broadened my emotional and intellectual universe, and built an identity separate from the one I was born into.

But unlike Vance, I did not return home to reclaim or reinterpret my origins. I built my life forward, not backward. Where Vance remains in dialogue with the culture that shaped him, my memoir traces the journey of someone who had to let go and escape my Wisconsin farm entirely to survive. Hillbilly Elegy reminded me not only of how far I had traveled, but also of how far the emotional echoes of my childhood can follow me, even into the best years of my life.