I love a good memoir. And I love reading a book after I’ve watched the movie just to see what they failed to put in and how they’ve portrait certain aspects of the pages. I’ve loved the Meemaw and the Mom, the sister and the uncles and the drug abuse and rehab and I love a coming of age and from rags to riches story just like the next person.

Where this book failed me a little from being perfection – the poverty references with numbers, the sometimes didactic feel (almost like a school essay) and the political references to Obamacare and the democratic choices. And sometimes the repeated notion that some people in America are doomed to fail based solely on where they were born and who their parents were.

Vance describes his upbringing and family background while growing up in the city of Middletown, Ohio. He writes about a family history of poverty and low-paying, physical jobs in factories that have since disappeared or worsened in their guarantees, and compares this life with his perspective after leaving it.

Though Vance was raised in Middletown, his mother and her family were from Breathitt County, Kentucky. Their Appalachian values include traits like loyalty and love of country, despite social issues including violence and verbal abuse. He recounts his grandparents’ alcoholism and abuse (his PawPaw used to drink and his MeeMaw was violent in retaliation to get him to stop being a mean drunk). He recalls how his grandma used to cut his grandpa’s pants at the seams to ensure they would rip when he would wake and bend and how she would throw things at him to get him to stop drinking. He also recalls how his grandparents vandalised a store when the owner was a little stroppy with his antics as a boy.

I was really into the telling of his unstable mother’s history of drug addictions and failed relationships. How him and his sister grew resilient and self-sufficient for having to fend for themselves at such a young age.

“For kids like me, the part of the brain that deals with stress and conflict is always activated…We are constantly ready to fight or flee, because there is a constant exposure to the bear, whether that bear is an alcoholic dad or an unhinged mom (p228)….I see conflict and I run away or prepare for battle. (p246)”

Vance’s grandparents eventually became his de facto guardians and were so until his PawPaw’s death and while his mother did try to take him with her at one point, the grandma intervened and took him back to ensure he got his education, his tools to succeed. I loved the story of the $180 graph calculator that they bought together to ensure the boy had all the tools to do math properly.

Vance goes into military and his time there teaches him how to be strong in the face of adversity and his military superiors become almost like a second family. They teach him where to get good deals on a car, how to balance a checkbook and how to ensure that all his grants are coming. He was poor and smart and that worked to his advantage. Some of the best schools in the country are nearly free for those who are poor – the trouble is sticking through and powering in a class divide once you get in. All kids of lawyers and doctors and highly successful people.

“I remember watching an episode of The West Wing about education in America, which the majority of people rightfully believe is the key to opportunity. In it, the fictional president debates whether he should push school vouchers (giving public money to schoolchildren so that they escape failing public schools) or instead focus exclusively on fixing those same failing schools. That debate is important, of course—for a long time, much of my failing school district qualified for vouchers—but it was striking that in an entire discussion about why poor kids struggled in school, the emphasis rested entirely on public institutions. As a teacher at my old high school told me recently, “They want us to be shepherds to these kids. But no one wants to talk about the fact that many of them are raised by wolves.”