Hillbilly Elegy

wasn’t speaking to Mom. But I
remember the one lesson I took from
them, and that was that we could do
anything we wanted. I wanted that baby,
and I wanted to make it work. So I did
it.” She got a job with a local telephone
company, worked her way up the ladder,
and even returned to college. By the time
she remarried, she had hit one hell of a
stride. The storybook marriage to her
second husband, Allan, is just icing on
the cake.
Some version of Gail’s story often
rears its head where I grew up. You
watch as teenagers find themselves in
dire straits, sometimes of their own
making and sometimes not. The statistics