The Story That “Hillbilly Elegy” Doesn’t Tell
Like many memoirs, J. D. Vance’s book misses a few details, some of which complicate the story upon which he has based much of his politics.
By Jessica Winter
August 16, 2024
Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance speaks at a campaign rally at VFW Post 92 on August 15 2024 in New...
Photograph by Jeff Swensen / Getty
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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.
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