I can see my mother in Vance’s mother, who suffered from addiction and lost her nursing license as a result. In the video, she wears the same puzzled, ashamed, and proud expression my mother did when she was treated, at a fancy bar in Harvard Square, by my thesis advisor, days before my graduation. I sent money home for the first time just weeks before, from my poetry thesis awards: to fund her and my brother’s travel to Cambridge, to pay an electric bill, to buy some prescriptions, and to buy a nice dress. She’d gone to Cato in the strip mall in Nitro and picked out a bold pink floral that flowed to the knee. She looked beautiful.
My mother told my thesis advisor that she loved me but never knew how to help me because she didn’t understand what I was writing. She hoped I wasn’t embarrassed of her. My advisor told my mother, “Sandy, Justin loves you, and he’s a songbird; he was made to sing.” My mother cried then, rare for her to do in public, in what I think was joy, but also an understanding that I would go on doing something that could hurt her, if she became my subject, as Vance’s mom became his. The difference is I never wrote directly about my mother when she was alive, in the thick of her battles. Even now, I hope I’m not betraying her.
Vance believes that addiction, like poverty, is a choice. He says, toward the end of Hillbilly Elegy: “There is room now for both anger at Mom for the life she chooses and sympathy for the childhood she didn’t.” He congratulates himself on creating boundaries and helping his mother, when he can, “by the grace of God.” Would he have brought his mother to this event if she had not recovered? Would he have composed an invective against her if she had not supported his exploitation of her in Hillbilly Elegy? Would he have been too embarrassed, as my mother feared, to claim heritage to those who “failed” to beat their sickness successfully? Is this public shaming his idea of help?
I don’t understand why empathy for someone suffering from addiction, as my mother and my brother and grandfather did, is such a radical stance to take—especially when people from Appalachia are only ever once or twice removed from someone in its claws. I do understand Appalachia’s distrust of prestige, even if it’s totalizing: that people in power, as Harvard and Yale have a reputation for educating, will use their power to further demean Appalachia. Would Vance be where he is if not for Yale, where the Tiger Mom, who prioritizes success and sees it as a way of rising above adversity, advised him to write Hillbilly Elegy? My guess is: yes.
Education may bring opportunities, new ways of thinking, but you choose what to do with them.
