Hillbilly Elegy

hypodermic needle sticking from his
arm. I should have been shocked, but this
was Middletown, after all. Just a few
weeks earlier, the police had discovered
a woman passed out at the local car
wash, a bag of heroin and a spoon in the
passenger seat, the needle still
protruding from her arm.
The woman running the hotel that
night was the most pitiful sight of all.
She might have been forty, but everything
about her—from the long, gray, greasy
hair, the mouth empty of teeth, and the
frown that she wore like a millstone—
screamed old age. This woman had
lived a hard life. Her voice sounded like
a small child’s, even a toddler’s. It was