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William Collins
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First published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2016
First published in the United States by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, in 2016
Copyright © 2016 by J.D. Vance.
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J.D. Vance asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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Ebook Edition © November 2020 ISBN 9780008219758
Version: 2020-10-27
For Mamaw and Papaw, my very own hillbilly terminators
Contents
My name is J.D. Vance, and I think I should start with a confession: I find the existence of the book you hold in your hands somewhat absurd. It says right there on the cover that it’s a memoir, but I’m thirty-one years old, and I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve accomplished nothing great in my life, certainly nothing that would justify a complete stranger paying money to read about it. The coolest thing I’ve done, at least on paper, is graduate from Yale Law School, something thirteen-year-old J.D. Vance would have considered ludicrous. But about two hundred people do the same thing every year, and trust me, you don’t want to read about most of their lives. I am not a senator, a governor, or a former cabinet secretary. I haven’t started a billion-dollar company or a world-changing nonprofit. I have a nice job, a happy marriage, a comfortable home, and two lively dogs.
So I didn’t write this book because I’ve accomplished something extraordinary. I wrote this book because I’ve achieved something quite ordinary, which doesn’t happen to most kids who grow up like me. You see, I grew up poor, in the Rust Belt, in an Ohio steel town that has been hemorrhaging jobs and hope for as long as I can remember. I have, to put it mildly, a complex relationship with my parents, one of whom has struggled with addiction for nearly my entire life. My grandparents, neither of whom graduated from high school, raised me, and few members of even my extended family attended college. The statistics tell you that kids like me face a grim future—that if they’re lucky, they’ll manage to avoid welfare; and if they’re unlucky, they’ll die of a heroin overdose, as happened to dozens in my small hometown just last year.
I was one of those kids with a grim future. I almost failed out
