Hillbilly Elegy

 Shirley J.                              Adult Non-Fiction                           Memoir, Appalachian Family LIfe

Hillbilly Elegy:A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J. D. Vance    288 pages        

A good book about real life growing up in Appalachian culture.   Many of the urban issues exist in the midwestern and southern portions of Appalachia that J.D. Vance grew up in and he discusses how they touched him and his family members lives with an open down-to-earth candor that is refreshing and teeters from sorrowful to funny.  He talks openly about his mother's addiction to drugs and the various drugs of choice she always had trouble with.   His last name fluctuates throughout his life as one of his mother's 5 husbands adopted him only to have to leave him in the lurch shuffling from home to Grandma's and various relatives throughout his childhood and teens.  While his family never admitted to it, most were alcoholics if not out and out drug addicts as Meth and Heroin took over even hillbilly terrain.   Money was good when his mother got along with whatever man she was with, but, when her personality (thought bi-polar) became too frenetic and she could no longer tolerate the current father figure and kicked him out, he and his sister often went hungry scrounging whatever they could to survive.  His grandmother and her siblings were hard drinking, cussing like sailors and  toting guns they were apt to pull on one another as quick as they would an enemy.   From all this J.D. Vance managed to grow up and graduate from Yale University.   A really good book and good look at what growing up poor, white and from the hills is like. I would recommend this book to mature high-schoolers on up.   Ron Howard made a film based on this book with the same title.