I read the book and enjoyed the "look how fucked up these people are" elements, while at the same time being confused by the authors perspective of praising said fucked up actions of his poor upbringing, from the heady heights of the Yale law academy. There was was an awful lot of hand-wringing about how much inner turmoil he had to deal with being split between two impossible states of being; a hillbilly, and an Urban elite. Yet that's what he is, he is both those things, is it really THAT hard to grasp that someone can be both... why all the drama? So yea the book was ok, but I'm guessing it speaks more to people in either of his two camps than it does to people in neither.

I forgot I read it until I saw the Netflix show advertised.

So over the weekend I sat down to watch it, and it was bad. Its not just that its a bad adaptation (which it probably is), its just that some of BS that you fly past in the book (say between Granny the gasoline gunslinger and whatever meth fuelled mess someone else was committing) were scenes like a goddamned Yale law student having an existential crisis over a salad fork and how it would impact his whole future. I gave up on the show around the point where they show his younger self doing a full-on header into a postcard stand in a gas station, where his mother furiously defends him to an overly obnoxious gas pumper... "My boy will show you he is worth three of you"...

I switched to the Diana documentary instead, another story of an upwardly mobile young person who dared dream above their station. Although in Dianas case it seems she was a naivete who wandered semi-blindly into her own nightmare, at least she had a sense of.. i dunno... responsibility, doing your duty.... Its foolish but at least you can admire it a little.

Vance seems to play both sides of the fence, defending his upbringing for their values, yet benefitting from the opposite values of the elite which raised him to where he is now. Which one is he representing here, which one is he selling out?