Hillbilly Elegy

that game.
What I do know is that Mom is no
villain. She loves Lindsay and me. She
tried desperately to be a good mother.
Sometimes she succeeded; sometimes
she didn’t. She tried to find happiness in
love and work, but she listened too much
to the wrong voice in her head. But Mom
deserves much of the blame. No
person’s childhood gives him or her a
perpetual moral get-out-of-jail-free card
—not Lindsay, not Aunt Wee, not me,
and not Mom.
Throughout my life, no one could
inspire such intense emotions as my
mom, not even Mamaw. When I was a
kid, I loved her so much that when a