아마존닷컴 종합 1위, 「뉴욕타임스」 논픽션 1위, 빌 게이츠와 소설가 김훈이 추천한 화제의 책
빈곤과 무너져가는 가족, 그 어둠 속에서 일어선 한 청년의 진솔한 성장기

‘힐빌리’는 미국의 쇠락한 공업 지대인 러스트벨트 지역에 사는 가난하고 소외된 백인 하층민을 가리키는 표현이다. 저자 J. D. 밴스는 힐빌리 출신의 32살 청년으로, 약물 중독에 빠진 어머니와 수없이 바뀌는 아버지 후보자들, 그리고 다혈질에 괴팍한 성미를 가졌지만 손자를 누구보다 사랑하는 조부모 밑에서 자라며 윤리와 문화의 붕괴, 가족 해체, 미래에 대한 체념, 소외와 가난이라는 현실을 마주하게 된다. 그리고 이런 현상이 인간의 삶에 미치는 영향을 자신의 짧은 삶의 궤적에 투영해 이 책을 펴냈다. 저자에게 물질적 빈곤보다 더 고통스러웠던 것은 안정감과 소속감을 느낄 대상의 부재, 목표의식의 부재라는 정신적 빈곤이었다. 밴스는 예일 로스쿨을 졸업하면서 성공적으로 사회에 안착했지만, 자신이 탈출한 그 세계를 저버릴 수 없어 이 책을 저술했다.

From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, a powerful account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America's white working class

Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis-that of white working-class Americans. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck.

The Vance family story begins hopefully in postwar America. J. D.'s grandparents were "dirt poor and in love," and moved north from Kentucky's Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually their grandchild (the author) would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of their success in achieving generational upward mobility.

But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that this is only the short, superficial version. Vance's grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother, struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, and were never able to fully escape the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. Vance piercingly shows how he himself still carries around the demons of their chaotic family history.

A deeply moving memoir with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.