The New Yorker:

Like many memoirs, J. D. Vance’s book misses a few details, some of which complicate the story upon which he has based much of his politics.

By Jessica Winter

Last month, after I published an article about the Republican Vice-Presidential candidate J. D. Vance and his fixation on the traditional nuclear family, I received an e-mail from Donna Morel, an attorney in San Diego. Morel is a fact-checking hobbyist—notably, she exposed major fabrications in best-selling books by the late celebrity biographer C. David Heymann. After Donald Trump named Vance as his running mate, Morel had begun looking closely at “Hillbilly Elegy,” the 2016 memoir that brought Vance to national prominence and provided the springboard for his foray into politics. Morel suspected that the book was “a little too made for Hollywood,” she told me—in 2020, it was adapted into a movie starring Glenn Close and Amy Adams—and she wanted to see if her hunch was correct.

Vance, it must be stressed, is no C. David Heymann. Judging by what Morel has unearthed from the archives, Vance has blurred some details, perhaps unintentionally, in a manner that likely comports with most memoirs, especially those that rely heavily on family lore. Vance is careful to acknowledge spots in “Elegy” where he may not have all the facts in place; in the introduction, he writes, “I am sure this story is as fallible as any human memory.” Still, Morel has identified discrepancies and omissions that complicate the family narrative upon which Vance has based so much of his conservative politics and ideology. Some of what was left out of “Elegy” undermines Vance’s larger political project, in which matrimony and the nuclear family are the foundation of a civil society that stigmatizes divorce, single parenthood, same-sex marriage, and, of course, “childless cat ladies.”

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