NPR’s Andrew Limbong speaks with Meredith McCarroll, co-editor of “Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy,” about the resonance and criticism of Sen. J.D. Vance’s autobiography.
ANDREW LIMBONG, HOST:
The big book that everyone’s talking about this weekend isn’t a sexy new romantic or a page-turning thriller. It’s the 2016 book “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir Of Family And Culture In Crisis,” written by Ohio Senator J.D. Vance. This week, it hit the top of Amazon’s bestsellers charts briefly after Vance was named the vice presidential candidate for the Republican Party. The book was a hit back when it first came out too, when Vance was just a guy who graduated Yale Law School and worked at an investment company in Silicon Valley. And it skyrocketed him to stardom in media circles. After it came out, you could see him on CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS. If you like public radio, you could have heard him on NPR or WHYY’s Fresh Air. It spawned a movie adaptation.
So what propelled this interest in this book back in 2016 that led Vance to where he is now? Meredith McCarroll is a writer and co-edited the essay collection responding to “Hillbilly Elegy” titled “Appalachian Reckoning,” and she joins us now. Hey, Meredith.
MEREDITH MCCARROLL: Hi, Andrew.
LIMBONG: All right. So I think we’ve established well enough in that intro that by, like, late 2016, people could not get enough of “Hillbilly Elegy,” right? But let’s back up a bit. Prior to the book’s coming out, what did you see as the mainstream view of the Appalachian region?
MCCARROLL: Yeah. I think that for a really long time, for a couple of hundred years, there has been really kind of two primary stories that have been told about the Appalachian region. One person called Appalachian people yesterday’s people, another writer called them our contemporary ancestors. And so the ways that that splinters is that one side of it is really romanticizing that being of another time. And then the other is looking at what can go wrong when people fail to adapt and evolve. So either that romanticized view of people from – who were stuck in the past or the sort of demonized view of people who cannot adapt, both can be used to justify the erasure of the places that those people live and the culture that they are holding on to.
LIMBONG: What was your reaction to the book at the time?
MCCARROLL: Yeah. So I am from western North Carolina, identify very much as Appalachian. I’m a twice graduate from Appalachian State University and write about Appalachia. And the first half of the book, for me, I was able to read empathetically as a memoir because the first half of the book really is sort of a personal narrative, where he’s telling his story about growing up with instability due to his mother’s addiction.
But then there’s this really subtle shift that happens in the book, where suddenly, instead of saying I, he says we. And he is implicating this broad 13-state region. He is playing into the stereotype of the lazy, violent mountaineer who can’t quite be trusted to take care of themselves. One writer in “Appalachian Reckoning,” Dwight Billings, compares it to the Moynihan Report. So it’s blaming the poor, thinking about the culture of poverty, rather than offering any kind of complexity and certainly no solutions.
LIMBONG: Yeah. You know, when a place or a region is forever tied to one piece of art, the people that live there often had kind of complicated feelings about it, and it kind of doesn’t matter how good the thing is, right? Like, I live in Baltimore. And, you know, I could gladly go the rest of my life without someone not from Baltimore talking to me about “The Wire.”
MCCARROLL: Yeah.
LIMBONG: You know what I mean?
MCCARROLL: Yeah.
LIMBONG: Like, how do you think “Hillbilly Elegy” colored people’s attitudes about Appalachia?
MCCARROLL: Yeah, probably similar to “The Wire,” because I’m like, oh, no, I watched two seasons of “The Wire.” I can talk to you about that.
LIMBONG: Yeah, exactly. And I understand everything. Yeah.
MCCARROLL: Yeah, totally. I think – I’m glad you gave that example actually, because that – I think it is a way to connect with someone and to say, oh, I’m interested in where you’re from. And I think that there is good intention, usually, at a certain point. What’s really tricky is that people usually don’t really want to have a deep conversation about that place. They just want to signal, like, yeah, I’ve thought about the place that you’re from.
But yeah, I mean, this is a book that, you know, for a while is the book that comes to people’s minds when they want to understand Appalachia. And it was never meant to be just a memoir. I mean, his subtitle is “A Memoir Of A Family And A Culture In Crisis.” And a memoir of a culture is not a thing. You can write a memoir of yourself. You can write a memoir, arguably, of your family. But a memoir of a culture? I mean, there’s sociology, there’s ethnography, but he’s not doing either of those things.
LIMBONG: After you put out your book, have you heard any response from Senator Vance about, like, the criticisms of his book?
MCCARROLL: Not directly. He was invited to the Appalachian Studies Association Conference in 2018 when it was in Ohio. And he did come and was part of a panel. I have not gotten the sense that criticism of the book has really landed and been very damaging to him. He’s not responded to any of the criticism that I’m aware of. And he has not engaged with the community of Appalachian scholars who tried to engage with him about the ways that the book is offensive to people in the region.
LIMBONG: Meredith McCarroll co-edited the book “Appalachian Reckoning.” Meredith, thank you so much.
MCCARROLL: Thank you.
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