I am nearing the end of J.D Vance's Hillybilly Elegy He is a very engaging story-teller and to an outsider to the culture it sounds authentic. He tells is in an unvarnished manner but there is a lot of love and nostalgia in his recounting of the past. This is how most of us like recalling our growing up years no matter how different they might have been from Vance's. The cast of characters that shaped his life are multi-dimensional. There are no villains here as he says early in the book though at first blush it may appear that there may be a few of those. He loves them openly blemishes and all.
There were times when Vance's book reminded me of Dave Egger's The Monk of Mokha. A coming of age story where a boy navigates through an endless assortment of adversities to somehow, unaccountably come into bright light in the end. The kind of story that fills people with hope and makes our own lives seem so uncomplicated and fortunate in comparison. Both stories are about improbable lives, about how a few positive influences in a child's otherwise miserable, dysfunctional existence may be all it takes to transform them in ways that seem magical.
Both books got me thinking about kids who with much less adversity than the protagonists in these books faced, have far worse outcomes. If resilience is more the exception than the norm.
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