The Story That “Hillbilly Elegy” Doesn’t Tell

Last month, after I published an article about the Republican Vice-Presidential candidate J. D. Vance and his fixation on the traditional nuclear family, I received an e-mail from Donna Morel, an attorney in San Diego. Morel is a fact-checking hobbyist—notably, she exposed major fabrications in best-selling books by the late celebrity biographer C. David Heymann. After Donald Trump named Vance as his running mate, Morel had begun looking closely at “Hillbilly Elegy,” the 2016 memoir that brought Vance to national prominence and provided the springboard for his foray into politics. Morel suspected that the book was “a little too made for Hollywood,” she told me—in 2020, it was adapted into a movie starring Glenn Close and Amy Adams—and she wanted to see if her hunch was correct.

Vance, it must be stressed, is no C. David Heymann. Judging by what Morel has unearthed from the archives, Vance has blurred some details, perhaps unintentionally, in a manner that likely comports with most memoirs, especially those that rely heavily on family lore. Vance is careful to acknowledge spots in “Elegy” where he may not have all the facts in place; in the introduction, he writes, “I am sure this story is as fallible as any human memory.” Still, Morel has identified discrepancies and omissions that complicate the family narrative upon which Vance has based so much of his conservative politics and ideology. Some of what was left out of “Elegy” undermines Vance’s larger political project, in which matrimony and the nuclear family are the foundation of a civil society that stigmatizes divorce, single parenthood, same-sex marriage, and, of course, “childless cat ladies.”

“Two generations ago, my grandparents were dirt-poor and in love,” Vance writes toward the start of “Hillbilly Elegy.” “They got married and moved north in the hope of escaping the dreadful poverty around them.” Bonnie and Jim Vance, who are immortalized in “Elegy” as Mamaw and Papaw, left their Appalachian home town in Kentucky in their teens, eventually settling in Middletown, Ohio, where Jim got a union job at the Armco steel mill; tragically, their first child died in infancy. (“Without the baby, would she have ever left Jackson?” Vance asks in “Elegy.” His grandmother’s “entire life—and the trajectory of our family—may have changed for a baby who lived only six days.”) Vance describes Bonnie and Jim as “alone in their new city” and “isolated” from the family they felt closest to. He allows that Jim’s mother, Goldie, was “nearby,” but that Bonnie disliked her, and that she was “mostly a stranger to her own son.”

Morel dug up census records and other documents that add nuance to this tale. “Hillbilly Elegy” doesn’t name Jim’s stepfather, Julius Blackmon, who had worked at Armco for years before Jim was hired there. (“Applicants with a family member working at Armco would move to the top of the employment list,” Vance notes in his memoir, without making the connection.) Despite any disdain that Bonnie may have felt toward her mother-in-law, Bonnie and Jim lived with Jim’s mother and stepfather at two different residences following their move to Middletown, according to the census records. Uncle Jimmy’s birth announcement, in 1951, also shows the young couple living in the Blackmon home. When Bonnie and Jim did get their own place, it was less than a mile away. And, when Julius Blackmon died, Jim was named the executor of his estate—yet another data point that contradicts the picture of estrangement that Vance sketches in “Elegy.”

None of these findings destroys the portrait of two teen-agers leaving their lives behind in Appalachia and striking out to create a better life for themselves in the industrializing Midwest. But the surprising elisions work to exaggerate Bonnie and Jim’s circumstances, putting dents in Vance’s version of their plucky, up-by-the-bootstraps story.

Bonnie and Jim’s marriage was, at times, deeply troubled—in Vance’s telling, both of his grandparents were violent, and Jim was a vicious drunk. But Vance praises them in his memoir and elsewhere for sticking it out. Later in the marriage, Vance writes in “Elegy,” they “separated and then reconciled, and although they continued to live in separate houses, they spent nearly every waking hour together.” (The relationship seems to have improved immensely, Vance observes, after Jim Vance quit drinking, in 1983.) During a 2021 talk in which Vance discussed how divorce harms children, he suggested that, following the sexual revolution of the nineteen-sixties, too many couples in flawed marriages began falling back on divorce as an easy way out, and he offered up Mamaw and Papaw as an aspirational counterexample. His grandparents, he said, “had an incredibly chaotic marriage in a lot of ways, but they never got divorced, right? They were together to the end, ’til death do us part. That was a really important thing to my grandmother and my grandfather.” By the nineteen-seventies and eighties, Vance told his audience, couples were more likely to see marriage as a “basic contract,” one that could be entered into and exited with ease, even caprice:

But that recognition that marriage was sacred, I think, was a really powerful thing that held a lot of families together, and when it disappeared, unfortunately, a lot of kids suffered. And this is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is this idea that, like, well, O.K., these marriages were fundamentally—you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy, and so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear—that’s going to make people happier in the long term.

According to records sourced by Morel, Bonnie and Jim—Vance’s flawed but heroic avatars of traditional marriage—entered divorce proceedings twice. In the first instance, according to court documents and also an announcement in the March 22, 1955, edition of the Middletown Recorder, Bonnie, then twenty-one, filed for divorce from Jim on grounds of “extreme cruelty” and “gross neglect of duty.” Joseph Nigh, a family-law attorney in Columbus, Ohio, told me that “ ‘extreme cruelty’ is a broad spectrum,” and can encompass physical assault, verbal abuse, or “demeaning conduct.” “Gross neglect of duty” is even more of a catchall term, Nigh said, intended to be left to a court’s broad discretion. (Nigh spoke with me about Ohio family law as a general matter, and did not address the Vance case specifically.)

The timing of Bonnie’s divorce petition is out of step with “Elegy,” in which Vance’s Uncle Jimmy compares the early years of his parents’ marriage to “Leave It to Beaver,” and says that, while their bond was always volatile, before the nineteen-sixties, “they were united, they were getting along with each other.” In the divorce petition, Bonnie asked the court for a restraining order against Jim as well as alimony, child support, and custody of three-year-old Jimmy. In August, 1957, the divorce filing was dismissed “without record,” leaving no documented clue as to why. Bonnie and Jim went on to have two more children.

Taylor Van Kirk, a spokeswoman for Vance, said, in an e-mailed statement, “JD’s grandparents lived difficult lives amid struggles with poverty, miscarriages, and alcoholism. But in their later years, they became overwhelmingly positive forces in the lives of their children. The decision for a married couple to divorce is deeply personal and individual—JD respects those decisions.” A representative for Vance also cited recent comments that the candidate made on Fox News in which he stressed that he has never “supported women staying in violent marriages.”