'I was born in poverty in Appalachia. Hillbilly Elegy doesnt speak for me.'
'J.D. Vance’s book “Hillbilly Elegy,” published last year, has been assigned to students and book clubs across the country. Pundits continue to cite it as though the author speaks for all of us who grew up in poverty. But Vance doesn’t speak for me, nor do I believe that he speaks for the vast majority of the working poor.
From a quick glance at my résumé, you might think me an older, female version of Vance. I was born in Appalachia in the 1960s and grew up in the small city of Newark, Ohio. When I was 9, my parents divorced. My mom became a single mother of four, with only a high school education and little work experience. Life was tough; the five of us lived on $6,000 a year.
Like Vance, I attended Ohio State University on scholarship, working nights and weekends. I graduated at the top of my class and, again like Vance, attended Yale Law School on a financial-need scholarship. Today, I represent people who’ve been fired illegally from their jobs. And now that I’m running for Congress in Northeast Ohio, I speak often with folks who are trying hard but not making much money.
A self-described conservative, Vance largely concludes that his family and peers are trapped in poverty due to their own poor choices and negative attitudes. But I take great exception when he makes statements such as: “We spend our way into the poorhouse. We buy giant TVs and iPads. Our children wear nice clothes thanks to high-interest credit cards and payday loans. We purchase homes we don’t need, refinance them for more spending money, and declare bankruptcy. .?.?. Thrift is inimical to our being.”
Who is this “we” of whom he speaks? Vance’s statements don’t describe the family in which I grew up, and they don’t describe the families I meet who are struggling to make it in America today.'>>>
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/i-grew-up-in-poverty-in-appalachia-jd-vances-hillbilly-elegy-doesnt-speak-for-me/2017/08/30/734abb38-891d-11e7-961d-2f373b3977ee_story.html?
= new reply since forum marked as read
Many of our neighbors grew up in the impoverished south that followed the Civil War. Most on workable land, but you don't have to look far to find former hardscrabble farmers. Doing well enough or not, they are typically frugal and simple in their lifestyles, for them the word "garden" means vegetable plot, and they bear very little resemblance to the stereotype described.
Now, the people I see buying cigarettes and lottery tickets at the only local convenience market are different, as are some of our neighbors' millennial and centennial generation kids/grandkids.
The latter did not grow up, as their parents mostly did, in what was still a sustaining, competent, dignified, low-income culture that will seemingly mostly vanish over the next quarter century. Nevertheless, most of them are doing better than their grandparents, no need to just sustain, few self-imposed bankruptcies. And they're big. 
Steroid-fed cattle big. None of those scrawny, wiry frames you still see in some around here that came from lifetimes of hard work and lean times that started before they were even born.
