Hillbilly Elegy
and see Mamaw whenever I wanted. She said something about needing to transfer to a Dayton school after my freshman year, but I f ...
encounters with our family. Given the state of Mom and Matt’s relationship, I was surprised when I came home from school one day ...
to dinner one night. She obliged, and with her relationship in shambles, she agreed to marry him a week later. She told me on a ...
Ken’s three children—a young girl and two boys about the same age I was —found the new arrangement as strange as I did. The olde ...
particularly angry. My desire to fight arose more out of a sense of duty. But it was a strong sense of duty, so Mom and I went t ...
vouchers—but it was striking that in an entire discussion about why poor kids struggled in school, the emphasis rested entirely ...
miserable. The constant moving and fighting, the seemingly endless carousel of new people I had to meet, learn to love, and then ...
would be forced to refer my case to county social services. Along with my abysmal school record came drug experimentation— nothi ...
genuinely happy. She was a good mom who doted on her young son. She had a little house not far from Mamaw’s and seemed to be fin ...
and California, I was stuck in a stranger’s house in Miamisburg, Ohio. ...
Chapter 9 Mamaw knew little of how this arrangement affected me, partly by design. During a long Christmas break, just a couple ...
tell her what I had called to say: that I loathed living with these strangers and that everything that had made my life to that ...
the importance of doing well academically. She often remarked that if anyone in our family “made it,” it would be me. I didn’t h ...
someone had called that morning demanding a sample by the end of the day. Mamaw’s piss was dirtied with a half dozen prescriptio ...
little. Lindsay once told me that, above all, Mom was a survivor. She survived her childhood, she survived the men who came and ...
mother, too. The color drained from Mamaw’s face, and she refused to even look me in the eye. What I had said had clearly struck ...
wouldn’t show up on the screen, she told me. “Besides, you probably didn’t know what the hell you were doing. You didn’t inhale, ...
could lead her to do something she’d regret later. Mamaw never lost that hope, after more heartache and more disappointment than ...
and regretful that I’d helped. A few weeks earlier, I had sat with Mom at a Chinese buffet as she tried in vain to shovel food i ...
wanted me to stay with her permanently, with no more moving in between. Mom seemed not to care: She needed a “break,” she said, ...
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