I love learning new words. I didn't know the meaning of the word elegy when I picked up Hillbilly Elegy to read. And I still didn't when I finished reading it. Just now as I sat to write my response to this honest description of growing up in working class poverty by J.D. Vance, did I finally look up the definition. As a reader who grew up in a working class family, I suspect J. D. would understand that order of fulfilling my curiosity. I love learning new words. My interest in incorporating new vocabulary into my speech is just one small example of how this story resonates for me. I relate personally to this memoir on many levels, the most obvious simply the familiarity of the experiences described.
elegy
a mournful, melancholy, or plaintive poem, especially a funeral song or a lament for the dead.
a poem written in elegiac meter.
a sad or mournful musical composition.
It isn't actually my interest in learning new words that provides one of many connections to J.D. Vance's story, but more accurately the experiences of being rebuffed for trying to use any new vocabulary in my day to day speech in a working class neighborhood as a child. The culture I grew up in was not Kentucky "hillbilly" the label J.D. Vance uses for his own family background but the experiences of my own raised poor working class upbringing would be recognizable to the folks in Vance's childhood community.
I made a new acquaintance recently during my reading of the book, carrying it along on a recent trip. Having already read the title she saw I held, she said it was hard to read. After sharing her thoughts of dismay and shock about events in the story, she asked my reaction to the book. I launched into my own disturbing family stories. My retelling of similar family experiences was probably more than she expected. My own life is filled with crazy poor working class substance abuse stories passed down from earlier generations of my family and lived through in my childhood.
Addiction, co-dependence, domestic violence, teen pregnancies and limited higher education were all a part of my life growing up, but fortunately so was a reasonably good public education system, a neighborhood of families who kept an eye on each other's kids and accessible public libraries. Those community resources were contributing factors in being able to rise above the disfunction I was raised in, but so was my own innate curiosity about the lives of others and the options I had a glimpse of. It was books filled with words of the life stories of others, books with promises of more somewhere else, sometime in the future, books that offered a mental escape. Holding those promises in my heart was a way to get through it all with the hopes of more and dreams of peace intact.
Hillbilly Elegy presents the hardships suffered by the working class in a specific part of our country but I've lived through and seen similar problems in other geographic locations in the US. Despite the hardships presented, Hillbilly Elegy is a story of hope and the accomplishments that can be made by one individual with the right love, encouragement and support to back them.
In just the last few days, I've learned that J.D. Vance is currently making an attempt to spread that hope further by running as a candidate for the US Senate in Ohio. Based on what I've come to know about him, I'd say he'd be an excellent voice for the people he would represent.
