Hillbilly Elegy

Mom’s bout with addiction ended as
they always did—in an uneasy truce. She
didn’t make the trip to see me graduate,
but she wasn’t using drugs at that
moment, and that was all right with me.
Justice Sonya Sotomayor spoke at our
commencement and advised that it was
okay to be unsure about what we wanted
to do with ourselves. I think she was
talking about our careers, but for me it
had a much broader meaning. I had
learned much about law at Yale. But I’d
also learned that this new world would
always seem a bit foreign to me, and that
being a hillbilly meant sometimes not
knowing the difference between love
and war. When we graduated, that’s