Hillbilly Elegy

miserable. The constant moving and
fighting, the seemingly endless carousel
of new people I had to meet, learn to
love, and then forget—this, and not my
subpar public school, was the real
barrier to opportunity.
I didn’t know it, but I was close to
the precipice. I had nearly failed out of
my freshmen year of high school, earning
a 2.1 GPA. I didn’t do my homework, I
didn’t study, and my attendance was
abysmal. Some days I’d fake an illness,
and others I’d just refuse to go. When I
did go, I did so only to avoid a repeat of
the letters the school had sent home a
few years earlier—the ones that said if I
didn’t go to school, the administration