Vance, a former marine and Yale Law School
                  graduate, provides an account of growing up in a poor Rust
                  Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the
                  struggles of America's white working class. The decline of
                  this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly
                  disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with
                  growing frequency and alarm. J. D. Vance tells the true story
                  of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when
                  you were born with it hung around your neck. The Vance family
                  story begins hopefully in postwar America. J. D.'s
                  grandparents were "dirt poor and in love," and moved north
                  from Kentucky's Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of
                  escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a
                  middle-class family, and eventually their grandchild (the
                  author) would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional
                  marker of their success in achieving generational upward
                  mobility. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays
                  out, we learn that this is only the short, superficial
                  version. Vance's grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most
                  of all, his mother, struggled profoundly with the demands of
                  their new middle-class life, and were never able to fully
                  escape the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma
                  so characteristic of their part of America.