Hillbilly Elegy

state’s flagship university. I felt
completely in control of my destiny in a
way that I never had before.
I knew that Ohio State was put-up-
or-shut-up time. I had left the Marine
Corps not just with a sense that I could
do what I wanted but also with the
capacity to plan. I wanted to go to law
school, and I knew that to go to the best
law school, I’d need good grades and to
ace the infamous Law School
Admissions Test, or LSAT. There was
much I didn’t know, of course. I couldn’t
really explain why I wanted to go to law
school besides the fact that in
Middletown the “rich kids” were born to
either doctors or lawyers, and I didn’t