Hillbilly Elegy

aunts, uncles, or cousins to help them
with the workload. The only nearby
close relative was Papaw’s mother,
Goldie. She was mostly a stranger to her
own son, and Mamaw couldn’t have
held her in lower esteem for abandoning
him.
After a few years, Mamaw and
Papaw began to adapt. Mamaw became
close friends with the “neighbor lady”
(that was her word for the neighbors she
liked) who lived in a nearby apartment;
Papaw worked on cars in his spare time,
and his coworkers slowly turned from
colleagues to friends. In 1951 they
welcomed a baby boy—my uncle Jimmy
—and showered him with their new