Hillbilly Elegy

her Christmas gifts to Middletown’s
needy. Shockingly, her parents obliged:
They didn’t define their family’s
Christmas holiday by the dollar value of
gifts their daughter accumulated.
However you want to define these
two groups and their approach to giving
—rich and poor; educated and
uneducated; upper-class and working-
class—their members increasingly
occupy two separate worlds. As a
cultural emigrant from one group to the
other, I am acutely aware of their
differences. Sometimes I view members
of the elite with an almost primal scorn
—recently, an acquaintance used the
word “confabulate” in a sentence, and I