Hillbilly Elegy

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 age, with limited mobility,
Mamaw loved to watch TV. She
preferred raunchy humor and epic
dramas, so she had a lot of options. But
her favorite show by far was the HBO
mob story The Sopranos. Looking back,
it’s hardly surprising that a show about
fiercely loyal, sometimes violent
outsiders resonated with Mamaw.
Change the names and dates, and the
Italian Mafia starts to look a lot like the
Hatfield-McCoy dispute back in
Appalachia. The show’s main character,
Tony Soprano, was a violent killer, an