The genesis of JD Vance — revelations from ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ about his politics, faith and worldview

“I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve accomplished nothing great in my life. ... I am not a senator, a governor, or a former cabinet secretary. I haven’t started a billion-dollar company or a world-changing nonprofit. I have a nice job, a happy marriage, a comfortable home, and two lively dogs.”

Those were the words greeting readers when they opened up “Hillbilly Elegy” — the story of how a Rust Belt-born boy with a childhood was marred by drug addiction, poverty and abuse landed a spot at Yale Law School. But now readers will imbibe those words differently.

Before JD Vance was a venture capitalist, a senator, a rising GOP star or former President Donald Trump’s running mate, he crafted a memoir that gave Americans a window to peer through to understand why Appalachia swung from blue to red. But perhaps more poignantly, why the working class resents elites.

Vance became something of a spokesperson for people who lost their jobs when factories shuttered and whose families were torn apart by rampant heroin addiction. He was no stranger to the impact of addiction — Mamaw and Papaw, his grandparents, raised him because his mother struggled with it. “Without question or qualification, the best things that ever happened to me,” Vance wrote of his grandparents.

Neither of his grandparents graduated high school. Few family members went to college. Vance almost failed high school. A Marine and a Yale Law School graduate, Vance contemplated his upbringing and explained why some in rural Rust Belt America struggle to envision the American dream.

“For there are no villains in this story,” wrote Vance in his 2016 memoir. “There’s just a ragtag band of hillbillies struggling to find their way — both for their sake and, by the grace of God, for mine.”

Now eight years after the publication of the memoir, it has jumped back up to the top of Amazon’s bestseller list — a day after Trump announced Vance was his running mate. So, this article revisits the memoirs and lists some of the most interesting revelations contained in its pages.

Grandmother helped him get to college

When Vance moved in with his grandmother in 10th grade, he said she taught him about the importance of working hard in school.

“We didn’t have cellphones and we didn’t have nice clothes,” said Vance, “but Mamaw made sure that I had one of those graphing calculators. This taught me an important lesson about Mamaw’s values, and it forced me to engage with school in a way I never had before.”

When Vance was later elected to the U.S. Senate in 2022, he paid tribute to his grandmother. “You’re not always going to agree with every vote that I take, and you’re not going to agree with every single amendment that I offer in the United States Senate, but I will never forget the woman who raised me.”

Vance is a Marine veteran

Without many family members who went to college, Vance was intimidated by the forms you fill out to obtain financial aid and apply to college. His grandmother tried to help him.

After graduating from college, Vance enlisted in the Marine Corps. He served America as a corporal in Iraq. He came back to the states after serving honorably and enrolled in Ohio State University. He graduated with a degree in political science and philosophy, and then went on to Yale.

He credits the Marines with teaching him “willfulness.” It also taught him basic life skills.

“The Marine Corps assumes maximum ignorance from its enlisted folks. It assumes that no one taught you anything about physical fitness, personal hygiene, or personal finances. I took mandatory classes about balancing a checkbook, saving, and investing,” wrote Vance. “When I came home from boot camp with my fifteen-hundred-dollar earnings deposited in a mediocre regional bank, a senior enlisted marine drove me to Navy Federal — a respected credit union — and had me open an account.”

Vance felt strongly agency changes outcomes

Vance wrestles with what can be ascribed to outcomes versus culture versus personal agency throughout his memoir.

“I don’t know what the answer is, precisely, but I know it starts when we stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better,” wrote Vance.

The book is critical of political rhetoric that deemphasizes agency.

“Here is where the rhetoric of modern conservatives (and I say this as one of them) fails to meet the real challenges of their biggest constituents,” wrote Vance. “Instead of encouraging engagement, conservatives increasingly foment the kind of detachment that has sapped the ambition of so many of my peers.”

He said spending was part of what led to poverty, in his experience, and debt plagues the working class.

“This was my world: a world of truly irrational behavior. We spend our way into the poorhouse. We buy giant TVs and iPads. Our children wear nice clothes thanks to high-interest credit cards and payday loans,” wrote Vance. “We purchase homes we don’t need, refinance them for more spending money, and declare bankruptcy, often leaving them full of garbage in our wake”

Religion is key to a better life

In the memoir, Vance cites statistics showing that people in the Rust Belt (and other areas) think they go to church more than they actually go. As a young child, Vance said this was the case for him and noted his father attended church regularly.

“The juxtaposition is jarring: Religious institutions remain a positive force in people’s lives, but in a part of the country slammed by the decline of manufacturing, joblessness, addiction, and broken homes, church attendance has fallen off,” wrote Vance.

But going to church can be life-changing — if they are heavy on social support.

“Dad embodied a phenomenon social scientists have observed for decades: Religious folks are much happier,” wrote Vance. “Regular church attendees commit fewer crimes, are in better health, live longer, make more money, drop out of high school less frequently, and finish college more frequently than those who don’t attend church at all.”

While Vance was not always in the pews of his church growing up, he saw the impact it had on people around him and saw that he needed that.

“For alcoholics, it gave them a community of support and a sense that they weren’t fighting addiction alone. For expectant mothers, it offered a free home with job training and parenting classes. When someone needed a job, church friends could either provide one or make introductions,” wrote Vance. “When Dad faced financial troubles, his church banded together and purchased a used car for the family. In the broken world I saw around me — and for the people struggling in that world — religion offered tangible assistance to keep the faithful on track.”

There were not many people like him at Yale

“At Yale Law School, I felt like my spaceship had crashed in Oz. People would say with a straight face that a surgeon mother and engineer father were middle-class,” wrote Vance. “In Middletown, $160,000 is an unfathomable salary; at Yale Law School, students expect to earn that amount in the first year after law school.”

Not a single one of Vance’s high school classmates went to an Ivy League School.

“Yale Law School was like nerd Hollywood, and I never stopped feeling like an awestruck tourist,” wrote Vance.

Social norms and capital

Vance spent a fair amount of time in his memoir explaining people in wealthier circumstances operate differently. They get jobs from making phone calls and connections, and are taught the norms of corporate professional America that the working-class are not taught.

When he got to law school, Vance said he did not know you needed to wear a suit to a job interview.

“It cost me a job in college (apparently Marine Corps combat boots and khaki pants aren’t proper interview attire) and could have cost me a lot more in law school if I hadn’t had a few people helping me every step of the way,” wrote Vance.

“When you go from working-class to professional-class, almost everything about your old life becomes unfashionable at best or unhealthy at worst,” wrote Vance. “At no time was this more obvious than the first (and last) time I took a Yale friend to Cracker Barrel. In my youth, it was the height of fine dining — my grandma’s and my favorite restaurant.”

Policy is not the sole fix

One of the crowning messages of the book is not government is not what people should solely rely on in order to be upwardly mobile. “One way our upper class can promote upward mobility, then, is not only by pushing wise public policies, but by opening their hearts and minds to the newcomers who don’t quite belong,” wrote Vance.

“Public policy can help, but there is no government that can fix these problems for us,” wrote Vance.