Hillbilly Elegy

came from a poorer background.
Afterward, I told Jamil that we were
probably the only people in the school
who’d ever had to clean up someone
else’s mess. He just nodded his head in
silent agreement.
Even though my experiences were
unique, I never felt like a foreigner in
Middletown. Most people’s parents had
never gone to college. My closest
friends had all seen some kind of
domestic strife in their life—divorces,
remarriages, legal separations, or fathers
who spent some time in jail. A few
parents worked as lawyers, engineers,
or teachers. They were “rich people” to
Mamaw, but they were never so rich that