Hillbilly Elegy

act. One of our neighbors was a lifetime
welfare recipient, but in between asking
my grandmother to borrow her car or
offering to trade food stamps for cash at
a premium, she’d blather on about the
importance of industriousness. “So many
people abuse the system, it’s impossible
for the hardworking people to get the
help they need,” she’d say. This was the
construct she’d built in her head: Most
of the beneficiaries of the system were
extravagant moochers, but she—despite
never having worked in her life—was an
obvious exception.
People talk about hard work all the
time in places like Middletown. You can
walk through a town where 30 percent of