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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I think Vance is a con artist. Grandparents with a $100K HHI and a mom who graduated top of her high school class, became a nurse, step dad who made at least $75K as truck driver isn't "working poor." And the town he grew up in in Ohio is STILL a pretty pleasant place. I think he's a smart nerd from Ohio that stole all the content for this book from white trash he saw in Kentucky.

Joined the military to pay for college? No. I think he's a clever nerd that wanted bonafides so he could get into an elite law school, write a book, run for office. The fact that Tiger Mom herself was his mentor at Yale tells you everything.[/quote]

I don't think you read the book. His mom was addicted his entire childhood and did not mother him. His entire family was deeply dysfunctional and traumatized. You can decide he was lying, I suppose, but if you accept that it is a faithful attempt and autobiography you have to accept that his family was very broken.

I am reading Dream Land now, about the rise of opiate addiction in the US and the role of a small town drug-producing town in Mexico and the pain clinic industry - its a good journalistic companion piece to Hillbilly Elegy, I think.[/quote]

I read the book and yes, I think he obviously embellished/exaggerated a lot of it.[/quote]

Not the PP, but I grew up about 20 miles from Middletown, OH (though from an entirely different background)  and, for me anyway, the whole thing went into the category of "Wow, you can't make this sh*t up."

Curious what you think was untrue.[/quote]

He wasn't poor, his town was solid middle class, he had college-educated family, his mom was super smart, she became nurse. That's a long ways from the trailer park.[/quote]

Addiction, PP. Addiction. It doesn't matter if your town is solidly middle class and you don't live in a trailer park. If your mom is addicted to opiates and can't protect and love you, your whole life is going to be f'ed up. And in that town (and in a whole lot of small town America) addiction is pretty prevalent. If you think he is lying about his mom being an addict and his grandparents being pretty abusive and no one really holding jobs...okay. But you seem to simply distrust that his story could be true because you don't think that area is poor enough.[/quote]

Except JD Vance didn't write a memoir about being a child of addiction. He wrote one about being a hillbilly when his immediate family no longer was. [/quote]

Read the book.[/quote]
I did. It's not good. My point is id he wanted to talk about how his addict mom made his life suck he should have written a book about being the child of addiction. He wrapped that up into some hillbillyness his immediate family DID NOT possess any longer. His parents made $100k in the early 90s and he lived in suburban Ohio. Sure he had issues from his mom's addiction but his whole schtick is it was because they were hillbillies which is just disingenuous at best to claim. [/quote]

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