'Hillbilly Elegy' is back in the spotlight. These Appalachians write a different tale

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, the 2016 memoir from Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance, once again began flying off the shelves after former President Donald Trump named Vance as his running mate. Many have turned to the memoir to find out the story of Vance’s upbringing, a core part of why he’s on the Republican ticket to begin with. But the book also brings along a host of assumptions that many authors still find not to be true.

Pulitzer-winning author Barbara Kingsolver said she felt that it was her duty to tell a different story of Appalachian life than the one that Vance presented in the book.

“It used the same old victim-blaming trope. It was like a hero story: ‘I got out of here, I went to Yale,’” Kingsolver said of Vance. “‘But those lazy people, you know, just don't have ambitions. They don’t have brains. That’s why they’re stuck where they are.’ I disagree. And that’s my job, to tell a different story.”

Vance’s has been mired in controversy since its 2016 publication, especially by authors who cover the region. Vance, who writes that Appalachian culture “encourages social decay instead of counteracting it,” says this upbringing is central to his political ideology and thinking.

Many Appalachian authors, like Kingsolver, have worked tirelessly to combat what they feel is a misleading and even harmful depiction of the region. Her novel Demon Copperhead, a fictional window into the same communities, was named one of the New York Times’ best books of the century just days ahead of the Republican National Convention. Last year, it won a Pulitzer Prize.

As hundreds of thousands more read about the plights of the Appalachian region, these authors are fighting back against what