Hillbilly Elegy

the demons of the life we left behind continue to chase us.

I spent the first eighteen years of my life pretending that everything in the world was a problem except me.

the measure of a man is how he treats the women in his family

In my immature brain, I didn’t understand the difference between intelligence and knowledge. So I assumed I was an idiot.

2014, in the richest country on earth, he wanted a little extra to eat but felt uncomfortable asking. Lord help us.

We tend to overstate and to understate, to glorify the good and ignore the bad in ourselves

Months away from graduating from Yale Law, I should have felt on top of the world. Instead, I found myself wondering the same thing I’d wondered for much of the past year: whether people like us can ever truly change.

most of all that I hadn’t escaped a goddamned thing.

described toward the end of Hillbilly Elegy—of replacing resentment with sympathy and understanding.

espite a relatively vibrant economy, many of the regional economies in the industrial Midwest continue to struggle, wage growth lags behind productivity growth, and many metrics of broader social problems—opioid overdoses, rising mortality—are going up. The rancor of the 2016 campaign continues to infect our discourse.