Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture

Papaw’s death and Vance’s mother’s poor choices are the two main areas of focus in these chapters. Papaw’s Kentucky funeral presents an adolescent Vance with a difficult choice: doing the “kid” thing and opting out of speaking at the funeral out of stage fright, or doing the “adult” thing and saying words honoring his grandfather. Vance chooses the latter, and in some ways this moment foreshadows many of the choices he makes in his life, highlighting the theme of The Appalachian Diaspora. Vance’s ability to step out into the unknown despite his fears is one of the reasons he succeeds after leaving his community.

Many details about Papaw’s character are offered here: “To every suggestion or behavior he didn’t like, Papaw had one reply: ‘Bullshit’”; “Papaw had a beer belly and a chubby face but skinny arms and legs” (107). Any fragile cohesiveness between Vance’s other close family members (Mamaw, Bev, and Lindsay) unravels, with each processing Papaw’s loss differently and on their own.

Vance’s reluctance to move to Dayton with his mom and Matt is telling of their uneasy relationship. His mother’s inability to make good decisions again surfaces via an affair with her boss, whom she marries. This is Bev’s fifth marriage, and Vance’s sister, five years older than he, is no longer a minor, leaving Vance too often to fend for himself in new domestic situations. This sudden loneliness manifests as, alternately, depression and rage, with Vance lashing out at step-siblings in one moment and curling into the fetal position in his bedroom in another.

All of this is enough for Vance to seek out alternative living relationships at his biological father’s house in Kentucky. Though Vance says he has a constant sense of “being on guard,” (123), this is a bright spot in an otherwise extremely bleak moment in Vance’s youth: his father’s home is calm, his dad and stepmother do not fight, and Vance himself does not fight with anyone else in the household. This section serves as an important step in Vance’s coming-of-age journey because he gets to see that there is more than one way to live. By progressively moving further away from his mother’s dysfunctional environment, Vance carves out his own identity and makes his own choices. However, the difficulties he encounters along the way foreshadow the depression and relapse into dysfunction he experiences in later chapters.