When J.D. Vance was a first year law student at Yale, his professor, Amy Chua, encouraged him to write a book about his life in rural Ohio. Six years later, in August of 2016, his book, Hillbilly Elegy, became a #1 New York Times bestseller. And since the election, Vance’s book has become one of the most talked-about books in America, as much of the country searches for a window into the lives of poor and rural white Americans who were especially vocal in their support for Donald Trump.
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- Vance was born James Donald Bowman. His middle name, Donald, was chosen for his father, Donald Bowman. After his parents divorced, his mother married Robert Hamel, known as 'Bob,' who became his legal father. S name was then changed to James David Hamel, thereby keeping the 'D' initial and preserving 'J.D.,' his universal nickname.
- In the movie, the hospital J.D. Vance's mother Bev (Amy Adams) is in is on the verge of kicking her out. In order to pay for a week-long stay in rehab, J.D. Puts the bill on four credit cards. He then learns that his mother has no interest in going to rehab.
When Chua and Vance met, Chua was in the process of publishing Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, about the strict parenting tactics she used to raise her daughters. Watching Chua share her family’s story with a national audience, Vance started to believe that he could do the same thing.
For The Atlantic’s series on mentorship, “On the Shoulders of Giants,” I spoke with the duo about their relationship, writing about their lives, and dealing with controversy. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Caroline Kitchener: In the acknowledgments of Hillbilly Elegy, you write that Amy Chua convinced you that your life and the conclusions that you drew from it were worth putting down on paper. How did she convince you of that?
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J.D. Vance: Amy just took an interest in me, and what personal experiences had made me who I was. The discussions about my background turned into “you should write a book” because Amy’s book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, came out at the end of my first year of law school. That created a natural conversation about whether I should be writing a book, too.
Kitchener: How did you feel about that?
Vance: I remember being pretty resistant to it. I thought the idea that I could write a meaningful book was kind of arrogant and presumptuous. But then I started writing little things here and there, and sending them to Amy. She would respond to them, usually positively—even though she probably thought it was all crap!
Amy Chua: The first couple of things that J.D. sent me, he sent with so many caveats. He’d say, “Please don’t show this to anybody,” or “I’m embarrassed to even be writing this.” He was completely resistant. When I read the first couple of passages he sent, I thought, “Oh my God—not only does this guy have a story, but he writes with such honesty. Everybody needs to read this.”
Vance: Eventually Amy introduced me to the person who became my literary agent—and it was off to the races from there. If somebody who has had success in the publishing world tells you enough times that you should write a book, you start to believe that it’s possible.
Kitchener: Did you identify with J.D.’s story at all?
Images Of Jd Vance And Wife
Chua: Well, obviously there are clear differences. I’m not from Appalachia and I’m the daughter of two immigrants who have graduate degrees. So in one sense we have nothing in common. But my parents came over here with zero money. We would get to go out to a restaurant maybe once a year. J.D. and I both remember all-you-can-eat buffets. There were a lot of parallels in our lives that made it very easy for me to see where he was coming from. Zeplin jira.
Adobe audition to obs download. Kitchener: How did you feel when Hillbilly Elegy took off?
Chua: Oh my god, I was so proud of him. But honestly, I always felt it deserved to be a bestseller. I’ve always been a huge cheerleader. In fact, I wrote a blurb for Hillbilly Elegy that was much more over the top than the one that made it on the back cover. J.D.’s editor made me tone it down! I wrote something like, “This is the best book I’ve ever read in my life.”
Kitchener: Both Battle Hymn and Hillbilly Elegy have received a ton of national attention, and both have been somewhat controversial. Did Amy give you any advice on how to deal with the press?
Vance: When I saw Amy responding to the firestorm created by her book, I just assumed that she just went about her day thinking, “Well, who cares what these people think.” It was really nice to hear that she was as bothered by criticism as I was.
Chua: That’s how it goes. Ninety-nine good things could happen, and all you can focus on is that one teeny-tiny piece of criticism.
Vance: The very first one-star Amazon review I got. I didn’t even know about it, but my aunt came up to me at the launch party that Amy threw for me, and said, “J.D., you have a one-star review. And it’s because you said nice things about Amy Chua.”
Chua: I was so upset! I was like, oh my god—I’m harming him. What we didn’t know then was that there would be 4,000 five-star reviews to come.
Kitchener: In Hillbilly Elegy, you talk about the advice that Amy gave you in law school as you were applying to clerkships. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Vance: There is this herd mentality when you’re a second-year law student that tells you to go for the biggest and most prestigious law clerkship you can get—the thing that’s going to give you the best chance of clerking for the Supreme Court. I was definitely caught up in that a little bit, even though I realized that clerking for the Supreme Court—as cool as it would be—wouldn’t really help my career goals. I already knew that I didn’t want to be a lawyer anymore. Amy gave me a really, really good piece of advice. She said, “You need to do something that is going to actually serve your career goals.” She also told me to focus on my relationship with this girl that I was really into. And now, five years later, that girl is 39-and-a-half weeks pregnant with our first child. Amy gave me the permission to chart my own path, both professionally and personally. It’s the best single piece of advice I’ve ever gotten.
Chua: I always thought J.D. was destined for great things, and that going the conventional route would actually slow him down.
Kitchener: Do either of you have any advice for students who are hoping to develop mentorship relationships with professors?
Vance: Don’t make it transactional. Don’t go into a relationship with a potential mentor thinking about what you can get out of it. Just get to know the person. I was initially drawn to Amy in the first place because we came from a similar place, and we had a similar way of looking at the world. Then a natural relationship grew out of that. I trusted her, so when she gave me advice, I actually took it.
Chua: There is this whole mentorship rage now. And I think a lot of professors are feeling like mentorship has gone off track. I’ll have students who will come in and say, “I don’t know what’s wrong, I’ve been here three months and I still don’t have a mentor.” I’ve said, “There is not a constitutional right to a mentor. You have to earn it like anything else in life.” I do love helping students. But those relationships need to be organic. As soon as it starts to feel transactional or entitled, it doesn’t work.
Kitchener: Often mentorship seems to go one way, and it’s clear how you’ve given J.D. guidance. Do you feel like J.D. has been a mentor to you?
Chua: Oh my gosh, absolutely. It’s exactly equal. I have learned so much from J.D. He offers me this window into a world I know nothing about. He has affected my own policy thoughts about what we should do in this country. It’s a two-way street.
Kitchener: Do you agree that it’s a two-way street, J.D.?
Vance: When it comes to my relationship with Amy, I am always afraid that I am taking too much. It means a lot to hear her say that I’m not. Amy has always been very helpful, always willing to make introductions. When the book first came out, she probably emailed every single television producer and personality in the United States of America. On the one hand, I really appreciated it. But on the other hand, I’m just not used to people of Amy’s stature being so nice.
Chua: I never knew you felt that way, J.D.
Vance: I did—especially when the book first came out, before things really took off. I felt like you were emailing me three or four times a day, telling me the things you were doing to help make the book a success. That meant a lot to me, but also I felt a little guilty—like, maybe I need to tell Amy that she can go back to her normal life!
Chua: It’s true, I emailed everybody. They were these creepy emails to people like Tom Brokaw, with lots of smiley faces and exclamation points.
Summary
While Vance admits he has few memories from before age seven, one of his most vivid is being told by his mother and sister that his father had decided to give him up for adoption. “It was the saddest I had ever felt,” Vance remembers. “After the adoption, [his father] became kind of a phantom for the next six years.” Vance’s mother remarried Bob Hamel, who would become Vance’s adoptive father but who irked Mamaw to no end. Although the couple’s marriage was initially peaceful, Vance imagines that Mamaw hated Bob because she saw herself in him. With Mountain Dew mouth and a trucking job, Bob was “a walking hillbilly stereotype,” and Mamaw had expected her children to marry “well-groomed middle-class folks.”
In an effort to erase any memory of Vance’s father, his mother changed his middle name from Donald (his father’s first name), to David, supposedly after his marijuana-smoking great uncle. Bev and Bob moved in near Mamaw’s house, and their jobs provided enough money for the family to live happily for a time. Vance’s mother encouraged him to read and learn as much about football as possible, particularly where strategy was concerned; she and Vance built models of football fields and used loose change to represent the players. “We didn’t have chess, but we did have football.” As a former salutatorian, Vance’s mother was, above all, a believer in the power of education, and Vance believes, “the smartest person [he] knew.”
On the other end of the spectrum was Mamaw, who encouraged Vance to learn the rules of fighting from a young age. “In the southwest Ohio of my youth, we learned to value loyalty, honor, and toughness,” Vance writes. Mamaw taught him never to start a fight, but to always end it if someone else starts it. There was one unofficial caveat to this, however: if someone insults your family, you may start a fight. Although Mamaw later took this back—and “Mamaw never admitted mistakes”—she also endorsed fighting when Vance was sticking up for the bullied.
Unfortunately, this fighting bled over into Vance’s home life. At age nine, his parents moved the family thirty minutes outside Middletown, devastating Vance (Mamaw and Papaw were his best friends) and exacerbating the already heated fights that had become a pattern for his mother and Bob. Like Mamaw, Bev never allowed herself to become a victim, and Vance recalls her not only initiating the violence at home but even during his youth league soccer games, pulling a woman’s hair when she insulted Vance’s playing. “I beamed with pride,” Vance recalls. Later, Vance would interfere in a physical fight between his mom and Bob, ending the fight by punching Bob in the face. He had been taught the hillbilly way of conflict resolution.
Vance’s grades began to slip in school, and he began to gain weight from the stress. He notes, however, that these violent family arguments were by no means uncommon amongst families he knew. “Seeing people insult, scream, and sometimes physically fight was just a part of our life,” he writes. Even so, Vance admits having a kind of love-hate relationship with the fighting, sometimes pressing his ear up against a wall to hear a fight better. “This thing that I hated had become a sort of drug.”
This all changed, however, when Vance arrived home from school one day to learn that his mother had intentionally crashed her car into a pole, possibly attempting suicide, or as Mamaw saw it, a staged distraction from her marital problems, the result of both debt and a years-long affair with a fireman she met at work. Either way, Vance’s mother divorced Bob and moved back to Middletown, one block closer to Mamaw than before. Nonetheless, Vance’s mother’s behavior worsened. She slapped or pinched her children, cycled through boyfriends, came home in the early hours of the morning, and said things for which Vance sometimes couldn’t forgive her. She apologized and promised that those things would never happen again. “They always did, though,” Vance writes.
It all came to a head the day that, while driving in the car with his mother, Vance made a comment that sparked her temper. She sped up, telling Vance she’d crash the car, killing them both. When she pulled over to beat him, he leaped out and took refuge at the nearest house he could find, telling the homeowner his mother was trying to kill him. Although his mother tracked him down, the homeowner had called the police, who arrived and arrested his mother. Arriving home that day, Vance remembers Papaw putting his head on Vance’s forehead and sobbing, the only time he’d ever see Papaw cry. Vance later lied in court, saying that his mother had not threatened him, but he lived at Mamaw’s house from then on. Mamaw promised her daughter that if she had a problem with the arrangement, “she could talk to the barrel of Mamaw’s gun.”
What Vance remembers more than anything about the experience was the difference between the way he looked and talked and the way the social workers, judge, and lawyers did. They all wore nice clothes and had “TV accents,” whereas his, as well as the other families in court that day, wore sweatpants and had frizzy hair. “Identity is an odd thing, and I didn’t understand at the time why I felt such kinship with these strangers,” Vance writes. He grew to understand this better soon when he visited his Uncle Jimmy in California, where everyone said he sounded like he was from Kentucky. Once again, Vance realized, the hillbilly culture had spread from places like Kentucky all across the Midwest.
Analysis
Much of Hillbilly Elegy is devoted to stories of familial violence—in fact, it is a Vance family legacy, with roots in the famous feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys. But in this chapter, Vance goes from a spectator of this violence to a participant. Surely, having studied his family’s stories of frontier justice, not to mention being chased around by his switchblade-brandishing uncle as a child, normalized the idea of violence in young Vance’s mind. But here, Vance admits to having embraced this legacy by fighting in the schoolyard and at home, punching bullies and even his own stepfather. Thus, Vance builds on the theme of inherited legacies of violence, and whether one can choose to escape from those legacies. As a child, he suggests, he could not.
Vance also compares violence to “a sort of drug” in this chapter, thus drawing a comparison between his love-hate relationship with violence and addiction. This metaphor allows Vance to illustrate just how central violence was to his experience of childhood, and how unhealthy it was for young Vance. Whereas we learn early in the book how proud Vance is to be part of this legacy centered on frontier justice, we see here that whereas he experiences pride he also experiences shame and fascination, voyeuristically pressing his ear up against the wall so as to better eavesdrop on the punches thrown by his mother. Later in the book, of course, comparing violence to a drug will prove devastatingly apt, as his mother will fall victim to addiction—ironically, the only thing that will quell her violent tendencies.
Jd Vance Website
Because of this confusing relationship with violence, young Vance begins to look in the mirror, noticing himself growing chubbier and less motivated. At the same time, he begins to look outward and, for the first time, notices the ways in which he’s different from the upper-class Midwesterners around him. He notices the “TV accents” of people in a courtroom and, on a visit to California, sees gay people in the Castro district of San Francisco. In contrast, he begins to notice things about him and his family that he took for granted: his clothes, his appearance, his accent, and his religion. For the first time, Vance is made aware of his own hillbilly-ness and feels “kinship” with those like him. Thus, Vance introduces the theme of identity, community, and belonging, the first step in his long journey towards realizing that it is alright to embrace some parts of one’s roots and discard others.
Jd Vance Mother Picture
Vance’s memories—and thus his tone—in this chapter alternate between warm and devastating. One of the most charming images is that of the model football fields he built with his mother, using pennies and nickels to represent the players. Perhaps a symbol of his family’s nuanced economic situation, this image dramatically contrasts with those he associates with his mother’s temper. For example, the imagery of Vance running away from his mother through the “tall blades slapping [his] ankles,” is vivid and terrifying. Indeed, the contrast between Vance’s various memories of his mother draw out the complicated nature of their relationship, which is itself charged with their contrasting identity politics; while Vance’s mother was salutatorian when she got pregnant, Vance would go on to attend Yale. Elevated in importance by the way Vance begins the chapter—“I assume I’m not alone in having few memories from before I was six or seven”—these memories embody the love-hate relationship that Vance has for so many parts of his hillbilly identity.
Jd Vance Mother Alive
Here again, the theme of the American Dream as imagined by his Mamaw and Papaw stalls and hemorrhages as Vance’s mother, who was supposed to achieve more than her parents, regresses and inherits their violent, irresponsible tendencies. We learn of Vance’s theory that Mamaw hates her daughter’s new husband precisely because he reminds her of herself: a hillbilly. Notably, even Vance’s mother reminds her husband of this, shouting in the heat of a bad fight, “‘Go back to your trailer park.’” Vance also makes a point of noting that his mother, salutatorian of her high school class, was the smartest person he knew. However, as we learn, this intelligence cannot save her from debt, marital failure, and domestic abuse inflicted on her children. Whereas Mamaw and Papaw moved from Appalachia to escape their family’s harsh legacy of violence, that violence follows them to Ohio; similarly, although their daughter was raised in a middle-class home that her parents’ family back in Kentucky couldn’t have imagined, even earning a job as a nurse, she ends up in court on domestic abuse charges. Thus, Vance illustrates how hillbilly legacies can coexist with the trappings of upward mobility, complicating the notion of the American Dream as the ultimate idyllic lifestyle that Mamaw and Papaw thought it was.