Hillbilly Elegy

won’t be enough.
It wasn’t just about the money or my
relative lack of it. It was about people’s
perceptions. Yale made me feel, for the
first time in my life, that others viewed
my life with intrigue. Professors and
classmates seemed genuinely interested
in what seemed to me a superficially
boring story: I went to a mediocre public
high school, my parents didn’t go to
college, and I grew up in Ohio. The
same was true of nearly everyone I
knew. At Yale, these things were true of
no one. Even my service in the Marine
Corps was pretty common in Ohio, but at
Yale, many of my friends had never
spent time with a veteran of America’s