The stories we tell: Why JD Vance’s ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ resonates so strongly in today’s America 

As a novelist, it’s my belief and experience that stories are the most — maybe the only — effective way to move people.  

At every juncture in our lives, we seek narratives to explain and comfort and celebrate. We bond through shared stories, choose friends and spouses and jobs and places to live based on the stories we’re able to build around those things. It’s not hyperbolic to say narrative is the framework upon which we construct what we think of as ourselves, and the very way we make sense of the world. 

Regarding the latter, back in late 2016 lots of Democrats were desperate to understand how Donald Trump had just won the presidency. By and large, they settled on a narrative sold to them by a latter-day Huck Finn named JD Vance, whose ready-made Hollywood story would become a feature film.  

Vance told well-educated, well-off progressives a comforting tale about how the people he came from were ignorant, bigoted and largely responsible for their own grim lot in life, painting a portrait of an entire subculture too dumb and shiftless to vote in its own interests. He gave liberals someone to blame for Trump, and they celebrated him for it — despite the fact that his politics ran counter to theirs, and despite the fact that his book was a 300-page exercise in what progressives avowedly consider a cardinal sin: victim blaming. 

Part of the reason Vance’s book resonated so powerfully with the well-to-do white left was that it dovetailed nicely with a story they themselves had been telling for a while. This narrative would only grow louder, more insistent and less tolerant of dissent as Trump’s presidency unfolded over the next four years. It comes under many labels, but these variations share a foundational narrative: that white people — all white people — are the perpetrators and great beneficiaries of an immovable apartheid system.  

Imagine you’re a poor rural white person. Your whole life, you and everyone you know seems to have been summoned out of nothingness to serve as disposable cogs in a machine you neither created nor control. This is the story — or lack thereof — that I grew up with in central Maine, an environment much like the one Vance described in his book. Where I’m from, many people do meaningless subsistence work that enriches neither their nor anyone else’s lives, drink and smoke to blunt the hollow ache, and die as soon as they’re able. 

The term du jour, also foisted upon us by urban elites, for this cycle of hopelessness is “deaths of despair.” But despair is not what kills us. We die for want of a story in which we see ourselves bonded to some kind of purpose. We die because we were born without a plot.           

It has always been this way, at least for the people I grew up with. My grandfather smoked four packs a day but had need of only a single match; you can imagine such a habit didn’t take long to do him in. My father smoked half as much, but that, along with a healthy dose of Agent Orange during his time in Vietnam, proved to be sufficient. Their lifespans, combined, barely added up to 100 years. 

I quit cigarettes myself a while ago, but there’s still a vacancy in me that wants to be filled with the malign warmth of smoke, a cavity the exact size and shape of the missing story about why I’m here and why I matter. 

Throw everything you like into this vacancy: booze and drugs and cigarettes, sure, but also food, sex, money (if you should be lucky enough to get your hands on some) and so on. The hole in me swallows it all and just keeps sitting there, the abyss that stares back eternally. Even though I’ve made a life of real work and purpose, I have to be on constant guard against the thing that’s killed so many of the people I love. Despair comes and goes, but the absence of a story abides — and it is lethal.  

So imagine this has been your life, devoid of any sort of redeeming narrative, and then someone suddenly informs you that, no, you do indeed have a story, and in it, you are the villain. You are complicit in, and the beneficiary of, the suffering of others.               

How would you react to such news? I can tell you how I, and many I know, reacted: We looked around and wondered where all this wealth and privilege we kept hearing about was, and why, if one of our supposed birthrights was better health and longer lives, we lived such brief, unhealthy ones. And then we took stock of the people telling us this story about ourselves and realized they had no actual idea who we are, or what life is like from where we sit. That they might, in fact, be accusing us of something of which they themselves are guilty. 

In the absence of a compelling story about our place and purpose in the world, a vacuum exists that must and will be filled by other things: the abiding desire, for example, conscious or unconscious, to obliterate oneself. The tawdry pride of place that can convince us people from elsewhere are our enemies. The brutish overtures of a dime-store demagogue.  

I don’t fully understand my cousin who died of COVID, but I understand why he refused a vaccine. It was a story he was told — one that felt true to his overall experience — about how overeducated people with money and power who didn’t care about his interests were trying to control him.  

The poet Marge Piercy wrote that “The pitcher cries for water to carry/and a person for work that is real.” It may be that the way to stop the cycle of hopelessness — among poor whites and all others — is to create a society in which everyone, no matter how modest their beginnings, has water to carry, and is respected for it.  

Now, as the Republican candidate for vice president, JD Vance will change his own story. He’ll do an about-face and tell the people of his provenance that they are, it turns out, not responsible for their own troubles. That, in fact, progressive white Democrats have abandoned them, and blame them for the country’s ills. And even though Vance is a hypocrite and base opportunist, he will not be wrong.     

We may or may not be bigoted, xenophobic or — by the standards of people who, like Vance, have Ivy League educations — simple. But we are not stupid. We know when we’ve been dismissed and disrespected and used as a political punching bag. We’re trying to sort out our place in an American story that, as of late, has not been working. And like anyone else, we’ll go where we’re wanted and throw our lot in with those who at least pretend to acknowledge our frustrations and our struggles. 

One wonders if the republic will survive long enough for Democrats to finally figure that out — and find a story to tell about it. Because, for want of a progressive story that actually embraces them, many of the people where I’m from will continue believing the fascist story they’ve been told for the last eight years. 

Ron Currie is a novelist and screenwriter. His commentary has appeared in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Salon, and elsewhere. He lives in Maine.