Hillbilly Elegy

newest wars. In other words, I was an
anomaly.
That’s not exactly a bad thing. For
much of that first year in law school, I
reveled in the fact that I was the only big
marine with a Southern twang at my elite
law school. But as law school
acquaintances became close friends, I
became less comfortable with the lies I
told about my own past. “My mom is a
nurse,” I told them. But of course that
wasn’t true anymore. I didn’t really
know what my legal father—the one
whose name was on my birth certificate
—did for a living; he was a total
stranger. No one, except my best friends
from Middletown whom I asked to read