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.

JD Vance is a liar; his own family says so. To his credit, he admits this in his book in a roundabout way (saying something oblique like Meemaw and his sister "remember things differently" and that the gasoline thing "never happened") but to his detriment, pretty much every engagement in his book is an obvious I-watched-too-many-ABC-Afterschool-Specials fabrication. Fundamentally his tale was one of a lower-middle-class white guy from rural Ohio who was given every leg up by the liberal elite, who were excruciatingly polite and took great pains to include him. Just a guess, but I'll bet as soon as he took a job with Peter Thiel the narrative about terrible liberals and the spiteful, pugnacious pride of "hillbillies" became a selling point. So the tale was rewritten as "success despite" rather than "success because" and then Trump won and every surface-level liberal fishing around for a simple answer lit upon "oh - it's because Appalachia is stupid and mean" so they could move on. I've had that discussion at least three times.

Hillbilly Elegy is a terrible fucking book. It's A Million Little Pieces for the investment class. White Trash, on the other hand, is the book Hillbilly Elegy should have been.