The “Book of Mamaw”: Religion, Representation, and Hillbilly Elegy

With the publication of J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis and contentious presidential election in 2016, Appalachia returned, once again, to national consciousness. Despite holding a relatively small portion of total U.S. Electoral College votes, national media outlets portrayed Appalachian states as key regions tipping the scales toward the Republican candidate Donald Trump, becoming “Trump Country” in widespread popular discourse. In this light, Vance’s memoir was hailed by many commentators as a unique window into the problems and perspectives of a homogenous white, rural working class who allegedly helped carry Trump to his election victory. One reviewer in the New York Times described Hillbilly Elegy as “a compassionate, discerning sociological analysis of the white working class” that may serve as “a civilized reference guide for an uncivilized election.” Rod Dreher, writing in The American Conservative, exclaimed, “You cannot understand what’s happening now without first reading J. D. Vance. His book does for poor white people what Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book [Between the World and Me] did for poor black people: give them a voice and presence in the public square.” Hillbilly Elegy became a national best-seller following such praise and Vance himself was elevated as a spokesperson (if only reluctantly) for poor Appalachians.¹

While some reviewers may have lauded Vance’s seemingly novel insights into a purportedly unique Appalachian culture, students and scholars of Appalachian history recognized the re-emergence of familiar and troubling themes in his work. Critical readers were especially wary as audiences increasingly saw Vance’s personal memoir and unique experiences as representative of the challenges and perspectives of the entire region, or even the entire nation. For historian Elizabeth Catte, Vance’s work and its reception closely mirrored media representations of Appalachia during the War on Poverty of the 1960s. “Much like the visual archive generated during the War on Poverty, Elegy sells white middle-class observers an invasive and exploitative story of the region,” Catte wrote. According to Catte, Vance’s work perpetuated some of the most problematic trends in popular portrayals of the region, masking deeper complexities of race, gender, and identity as well as the broader structural forces contributing to the region’s social and environmental struggles.²

Such concerns also helped generate a 2019 edited volume, Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy, which brought together numerous scholars, artists, and activists from the region to evaluate and address many of Vance’s claims and the popular response to his work. Like Catte, many of the contributors to this volume were wary of Vance’s arguments and their reception in national media. In his contribution to Appalachian Reckoning, for example, Dwight Billings described Hillbilly Elegy as an “inventory of pathological Appalachian traits . . . [that] reads like a catalogue of stereotypes Appalachian scholars have worked so long to dispel.” Ivy Brashear similarly characterized Vance’s work as “a poorly written appropriation of Appalachian stereotypes about violent, ignorant, and slovenly hillbillies who refuse to help themselves despite having every opportunity to do so.” For these scholars, Hillbilly Elegy exemplified the ongoing construction of Appalachia as a unique place and culture within but also distinct from the broader United States—a theme termed “Appalachian exceptionalism.” Simultaneously, for these scholars, the popular reception of Vance’s work also demonstrated the potential of these constructions to guide national policies and perceptions, negatively influencing the well-being of people in the area.³

Others, however, defended Hillbilly Elegy as a personal reflection that was never intended as a scholarly analysis of the region’s history and challenges. Kelli Hansel Haywood’s article in Appalachia Reckoning, for example, argued that Vance highlighted important issues in Appalachia and that scholars and commentators should “stop hiding from the issues and criticizing this man [Vance] for a book that is mostly memoir, only a small part commentary, and even a smaller part political polemic.” In the opening pages of his work Vance himself highlighted the limitations of his volume, stating directly that “this book is not an academic study...