Hillbilly Elegy

material comforts. Jimmy, Mamaw
would tell me later, could sit up at two
weeks, walk at four months, speak in
complete sentences just after his first
birthday, and read classic novels by age
three (“A slight exaggeration,” my uncle
later admitted). They visited Mamaw’s
brothers in Indianapolis and picnicked
with their new friends. It was, Uncle
Jimmy told me, “a typical middle-class
life.” Kind of boring, by some standards,
but happy in a way you appreciate only
when you understand the consequences
of not being boring.
Which is not to say that things
always proceeded smoothly. Once, they
traveled to the mall to buy Christmas