Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture
86 pages • 2-hour read
J. D. VanceHillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 5-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary
Vance provides background on his biological father, Don Bowman. Vance’s mom and Bowman marry in 1983 and divorce “around the time [Vance] started walking” (61-62). Bev, Vance’s mom, remarries a couple of years after. When Vance is six, his father gives him up for adoption, moving to Kentucky and converting to Pentecostal Christianity. Vance’s sister, Lindsay, has a different biological father than Vance.
Bob Hamel, Bev’s new husband, becomes Vance’s stepfather and adoptive dad. Mamaw refers to Bob as a “toothless fucking retard,” (62), in part because Bob, like Mamaw herself, comes from a hillbilly background, and Mamaw wants something different for her children. With the adoption comes Vance’s first name change. “When Bob became my legal father, Mom changed my name from James Donald Bowman to James David Hamel. Until then, I’d borne my father’s first name as my middle name, and Mom used the adoption to erase any memory of his existence” (63).
Bob and Bev buy a house a few blocks from Mamaw; Vance develops a fondness for reading and football, and, especially, for quarterback Joe Montana. We learn of Bev’s more positive traits, especially her wanting Vance to have a good education, and care about education in general. During these formative years, Vance has the hillbilly code of honor instilled in him by Mamaw, citing an incident in grade school where Mamaw encourages him to take on the school bully, who is especially harsh to a classmate of Vance’s.
Bev and Bob decide to move to Preble County—”a sparsely populated part of Ohio farm country approximately thirty miles from Middletown” (69)—when Vance is nine years old. The marriage unravels: Bob and Bev acquire heavy debt from unnecessary purchases, and Bev grows physically violent toward her husband, though Bob is not physically abusive back. Vance starts to have trouble in school and puts on weight. His mom attempts suicide by crashing the family minivan into a telephone pole. Without Bob, Vance and his mom move back to Middletown a month later.
Bev’s descent into alcohol and drug-fueled psychosis deepens. Vance details a trip to the mall gone awry, his mother so out-of-control she tells Vance she is going to crash the car and kill them both. Bev pulls over on the side of the highway and Vance escapes to a stranger’s house, nearby. Bev arrives; the police are called, and Vance’s mother is arrested. Vance is forced to testify—and lie—in court, for his mother to avoid jail time. The chapter concludes with Vance taking a trip to California with Lindsay, to visit Uncle Jimmy, Bev’s brother.
Chapter 6 Summary
The initial focus of Chapter 6 is on Lindsay Lewis, Vance’s sister, whom Vance reveres and adores. She is five years older than Vance and “born just two months after Mom graduated high school” (82). When Lindsay loses the opportunity to audition in New York to become a model, which the family believed would be her ticket out of poverty, she asks Mamaw if God loves them. Mamaw’s response is to recite the parable about a man who refuses to be rescued from a flood because he believes God will save him. Foolishly, he fails to see that those who wanted to aid him were working on God’s behalf.
We learn of Christianity’s influence in Vance’s households, along with Vance’s own desire to be closer to the Christian faith. To this end, he spends a summer with his biological father, Don Bowman, in Kentucky, who is described, broadly, as “mean” by the many women in the family, but now has a new wife, has found God, and changed his ways.
Here, Vance provides data on religion in Appalachia, citing a Gallup poll detailing that, “Southerners and Midwesterners reported the highest rates of church attendance in the country. Yet actual church attendance is much lower in the South” (93). Vance adds that while “religious institutions remain a positive force in people’s lives […] in a part of the country slammed by the decline of manufacturing, joblessness, addiction, and broken homes, church attendance has fallen off” (93).
The chapter concludes with an adolescent Vance weighing the secular and spiritual aspects of his life, and how the two often collide. “The downside of his [dad’s] theology was that it promoted a certain segregation from the outside world. I couldn’t listen to Eric Clapton at Dad’s house—not because the lyrics were inappropriate but because Eric Clapton was influenced by demonic forces” (96).
Chapters 5-6 Analysis
While Vance does not elucidate what ACEs (adverse child experiences) are until the last sections of Hillbilly Elegy, he shows them in blunt, emotional force in Chapter 5. The decision by his biological father to give him up for adoption because he does not want to pay for child support is selfish, and the details of the ill-fated trip Vance takes with his mom (for his mother to buy him football cards, to make up for a previous wrong) are harrowing. It is here that Vance shows how two other family members—his older sister, Lindsay, and his grandmother, Mamaw—increasingly fill in the gap left by Vance’s mother’s descent into addiction, rage, and psychosis.
The detail about the football cards is telling of another aspect of what Vance identifies as endemic to white, working-class culture: the purchasing of material items to solve problems. His mother often bought him things to make up for her bouts of poor behavior; Vance also views conspicuous purchasing of luxury goods as a means of escapism for broader white, working-class culture, with TVs and iPads functioning as ways to avoid economic realities that ultimately compound existing financial troubles.
The Chapter 6 episode in which Mamaw tells a disappointed Lindsay the parable about a man whose house has flooded but refuses help illustrates the theme of Personal Versus Societal Responsibility for the Disenfranchised. Just as the family wants Vance to pursue education to make himself a better life, the family supports Lindsay’s desire to become a model as an opportunity to get out of their impoverished environment. When they realize how expensive the trip to New York is and the likelihood the “audition” is a sham, Lindsay tearfully asks if God loves them. If he does, why wouldn’t he save them from their situation? The moral of Mamaw’s story is that God helps those who help themselves.
Functioning as a counterbalance to this is the avenue to Christianity Vance discovers at his now-reformed, biological father’s home. Don Bowman leaves Kentucky for Ohio, then returns to Kentucky after his divorce from Vance’s mom. Vance’s time living with his father—a brief stint over a summer before Vance enters junior high school—provides the opportunity to weigh secular aspects of his existence against spiritual ones and to understand how elements of the two struggle to cohabitate, at least in Vance’s father’s home.
Vance identifies Christianity as a force that has eroded in the lives of many Appalachian families, despite statistical data (shown by Vance) proving that those who attend a theological institution do better in life than those who do not. Vance’s forays into the rhetoric of evangelical Christianity momentarily work as an inroad to discovering his identity, but he is also aware of the xenophobia that aspects of his faith harbor. “My new faith had put me on the lookout for heretics […] Even Mamaw fell from favor because her religious views didn’t conflict with her affinity for Bill Clinton” (96-97).
Unlock all 86 pages of this Study Guide
Get in-depth, chapter-by-chapter summaries and analysis from our literary experts.
- Grasp challenging concepts with clear, comprehensive explanations
- Revisit key plot points and ideas without rereading the book
- Share impressive insights in classes and book clubs