Hillbilly Elegy

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 enjoyment.
To me, Jackson was about my uncles,
and chasing turtles, and finding peace
from the instability that plagued my Ohio
existence. Jackson gave me a shared
home with Mamaw, a three-hour road
trip to tell and listen to stories, and a
place where everyone knew me as the
grandson of the famous Jim and Bonnie
Vance. Jackson was something much
different to her. It was the place where
she sometimes went hungry as a child,
from which she ran in the wake of a
teenage pregnancy scandal, and where