Hillbilly Elegy

and a happy life in a city I loved—
Cincinnati. Usha and I had returned there
for a year after law school for one-year
clerkships and had built a home with our
two dogs. I was upwardly mobile. I had
made it. I had achieved the American
Dream.
Or at least that’s how it looked to an
outsider. But upward mobility is never
clean-cut, and the world I left always
finds a way to reel me back in. I don’t
know the precise chain of events that led
me to that hotel, but I knew the stuff that
mattered. Mom had begun using again.
She’d stolen some family heirlooms
from her fifth husband to buy drugs
(prescription opiates, I think), and he’d