Hillbilly Elegy

little. Lindsay once told me that, above
all, Mom was a survivor. She survived
her childhood, she survived the men who
came and went. She survived successive
brushes with the law. And now she was
doing everything she could to survive an
encounter with the nursing board.
I exploded. I told Mom that if she
wanted clean piss, she should stop
fucking up her life and get it from her
own bladder. I told Mamaw that
enabling Mom made it worse and that if
she had put her foot down thirty years
earlier, then maybe Mom wouldn’t be
begging her son for clean piss. I told
Mom that she was a shitty mother and I
told Mamaw that she was a shitty