86 pages • 2 hours read
J. D. VanceHillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Symbols & Motifs
Hotels
Hotels function as a sanctuary of last resort throughout the memoir, especially for Vance’s female family members, when they seek exit from an abusive relationship. Toward the end of the book, Vance pays for a week’s worth of nights at a Middletown hotel, so that his mother, now unemployed and addicted to heroin, will not go homeless. More implicitly, hotels reinforce the transitory nature of Vance’s youth, as he moves from home to home in Ohio and Kentucky.
US Route 23
If one of the book’s central themes is migration, and especially “out-migration” by Kentucky Appalachians to parts of the Midwest and beyond, then US Route 23 is that out-migration’s prime motif. While its chief, explicit reference occurs at the end of Chapter 2, its presence is felt throughout the memoir, as family members travel back and forth between Ohio and Kentucky. Before Lyndon Johnson expanded America’s highway and freeway infrastructure, US Route 23 was the primary route between Jackson, Kentucky, and Ohio, and a road well-worn by waves of Kentucky emigrants seeking a better life outside the “holler.”
Kentucky
For Vance, Kentucky embodies two things: male role models and childhood freedom. In remembering Kentucky, Vance waxes nostalgic about his closeness with nature and finding a sense of peace, one most often unattainable in Ohio. “Jackson,” Vance says, “was the one place that belonged to me, my sister and Mamaw” (13).
Kentucky is also the place where Vance encounters the most positive male role models in his life. When Vance is very young, various members of the Blanton clan, and as a teenager, his biological father, Don Bowman, provides Vance with an example of what a peaceful household maintained by a nuclear family is like.
