Hillbilly Elegy

Ken nor his children ever stole from me.) Though I loved living with her, my new home tested my patience on many levels. I still ...

bad: She said it to everyone she beat, and she beat everyone at gin rummy.) Years later, every single one of my relatives—Aunt W ...

a TV show with her on a Friday night, a creepy murder mystery, the type of show Mamaw loved to watch. At the climax of the show, ...

school, we visited Kentucky only a few times a year for a few days at a time. Living with Mamaw, I learned that she and her sist ...

She, too, had a point. I started to understand that Mamaw saw returning to Jackson as a duty to endure rather than a source of e ...

so many of her friends had given their lives in the mines. I wanted to escape to Jackson; she had escaped from it. In her old ag ...

objectively terrible person by almost any standard. But Mamaw respected his loyalty and the fact that he would go to any length ...

up, you son of a bitch.” My cousin Bonnie Rose ran to the back door and began screaming over and over, “Son of a bitch! Son of a ...

of how she felt, whether her emphysema made it difficult to breathe or her hip hurt so badly that she could barely walk, she nev ...

“I hate the damned food here. Can you go to Taco Bell and get me a bean burrito?” Indeed, Mamaw hated everything about the nursi ...

then on. Now that I’m a lawyer, I marvel that we never considered a medical malpractice suit against the doctor who operated unn ...

understood, Mom equated money with affection. Perhaps she felt that I would never appreciate that she loved me unless she offere ...

picked me up from school, I’d ask her not to get out of the car lest my friends see her—wearing her uniform of baggy jeans and a ...

the students for his brilliance and high demands. In twenty years, he had never missed a day of school. According to Middletown ...

Mamaw loved stories like this, and though she never met Selby, she admired him and encouraged me to follow his lead. Selby encou ...

better take schoolwork more seriously. I owed it to her, and she reminded me of it constantly. “Have you finished your work for ...

started to talk about the problems in our community. Mamaw encouraged me to get a job—she told me that it would be good for me a ...

hurry, pacing between aisles, looking frantically for a particular item. But others waded through the aisles deliberately, caref ...

formula. “Don’t rich people have babies, too?” Mamaw had no answers, and it would be many years before I learned that rich folks ...

feeling that my boss counted my people as less trustworthy than those who took their groceries home in a Cadillac. But I got ove ...