Hillbilly Elegy

I thought of them as fundamentally
different. They still lived within walking
distance of my house, sent their kids to
the same high school, and generally did
the same things the rest of us did. It
never occurred to me that I didn’t
belong, even in the homes of some of my
relatively wealthy friends.
At Yale Law School, I felt like my
spaceship had crashed in Oz. People
would say with a straight face that a
surgeon mother and engineer father were
middle-class. In Middletown, $160,000
is an unfathomable salary; at Yale Law
School, students expect to earn that
amount in the first year after law school.
Many of them are already worried that it