Love in the Time of Hillbilly Elegy: On JD Vance’s Appalachian Grift

Justin B. Wymer knows a snake when he sees one:

The hardest drive I ever had to make lasted 15 minutes. It was from my father’s house on a hilly farm in Winfield, West Virginia, to St. Albans, the small town I grew up outside, on the day of my mother’s funeral. I’d just flown in from Denver, and I hadn’t slept in days. My brother was in the hospital, and he was refusing visitors.

My aunt, who’d driven in from North Carolina for the funeral, and I had tried to find the cause of what we assumed was another overdose for my brother. With him stabilized in the hospital, we looked through his hundreds of keys, his boxes of glasses and knives he’d collected, to find the one to his biggest safe, where we assumed we’d discover one of my mom’s hydrocodone bottles squirreled away. His safe had some photos, a watch, some cologne. We thought maybe he’d attempted suicide, which was honestly unlike him, but grief does wild things. Maybe, we decided, he’d gotten the drugs from a girlfriend who’d pawned my mother’s remaining jewelry for the goods. It wouldn’t be the first time.

My aunt and I called his cell phone, left at home when the ambulance took him. We searched the house in frenzied precision, looking for an explanation to one narrowly avoided death to distract from the real one, my mother’s. We heard it buzz from the basement. We searched the insulation between exposed rafters, hoisted up on step ladders and a beat-up futon. It wasn’t there. We heard the buzz through the wood. It was upstairs. We ran back up and found it hidden under chip bags, inside a blanket folded, behind an empty gun case, in my brother’s bedroom. We searched his messages, but there was no proof he’d bought any drugs. As we later found out, he’d suffered acute kidney failure after not drinking any water, in grief.

He and my mother were inseparable; they loved each other fiercely, debilitatingly. They were tumultuous, but they’d saved each other’s lives again and again, over the years. He didn’t know how to live without her; he couldn’t care for himself when it wasn’t a byproduct of caring for her. He ended up missing our mother’s funeral because he was in hospital, and he never forgave himself for it.

When I walked into the funeral home, there were more flies around the single standing spray of flowers than people in attendance. One now-deceased cousin showed up in neon-yellow socks and gym shorts, and when asked, he said, “Sandy would want me to be comfortable.” My uncle, his father, would not speak to me because he’d told my mother she should abandon me because of my sexuality, but I was told his showing up was his version of respect for me, and I should be happy with that. People told me I looked great, in a blazer my aunt had bought me for job interviews. “Harvard looks good on you,” they said. “We loved that obituary you wrote. We could tell you wrote it; it was poetic-like.” Even there, when I couldn’t afford to bury my mother, they saw me as my education, as my profession.

I paid the singer–preacher my mother loved, who consoled the audience by saying she succeeded in being a woman of God. It offered me no consolation. This funeral wasn’t for me. This funeral was for the people who, judging my mother an addict, never showed up to mourn her. At least, I thought, in the Charleston Gazette, I’d show my mother for the intelligent, complicated woman she was in the obituary I wrote. It was, of course, maudlin, but it was honest, and it cost me $400 to publish. I’d used my education, my grad student stipend, to give her that much.

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