JD Vance's Childhood Was More Horrific Than You Realized

No one who picked up and read "Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis" back in 2016 could have predicted that its author, J.D. Vance, would be running for Donald Trump's vice president in 2024. That includes Vance himself, who says in the intro to his book that he is "not a senator, a governor, or a former cabinet secretary." He is no one special at all, he explains, and has done nothing extraordinary. He is a self-described "Scots-Irish hillbilly at heart" whose family has roots in rural Kentucky in the massive and impoverished swath of Greater Appalachia. The midlife ordinariness of his happy marriage, home, and two dogs, he explains, was prefaced by the tragic ordinariness of his upbringing — the kind which he shared with countless individuals.

Following Vance's announcement that he'd be joining the 2024 Republican presidential ticket, plenty of articles cropped up online criticizing the conclusions he drew from these childhood experiences. One Charlotte Observer article disagrees with Vance's assessment of Appalachians as largely "lazy and pessimistic" people who don't take responsibility for their own lives. Another article on The Washington Post says much the same, calling out what it describes as a strangely contradictory combination of sympathy and blame for the poor.    

And yet, nobody discounts Vance's actual experiences. He came from a broken home riddled with bizarre violence, rampant substance abuse by relatives such as his mother Beverly, a twisted teenage reunion with his estranged father Donald, and much more.

When looking at J.D. Vance's upbringing, we have no choice but to start with his mother, Beverly. Judging by the recent Republican National Convention (RNC) where Vance spoke of his family and childhood, he and his mother have come to a mutual understanding in the long years since his tumultuous childhood. In fact, they even seem to share a loving relationship. At the RNC Vance broadly touched on what he talked about in detail in his 2016 memoir, "Hillbilly Elegy," when he described the Republican Party as supportive of "single moms like mine, who struggled with money and addiction but never gave up." He also said his mother was 10 years sober.

Beverly's problems stemmed largely from substance abuse. As a nurse she had access to prescription medicines, which she abused and caused unstable, aggressive, violent behavior at home. Beverly was arrested when Vance was 12 years old for speeding while declaring that she was going to kill them both. In a 2017 interview on NBC News, Vance, nearly in tears, described her arrest as a relief because it meant he was "going to live another day." He also recounted witnessing his mother being depressed, suicidal, and "humiliating" him. 

Meanwhile, in his book, Vance wrote of a "revolving door of father figures" following his mother's divorce from his father when he was 6 years old. Afterward, Beverly remarried and divorced multiple times more. This, he said, he hated more than anything else.

At some point, J.D. Vance left his mother's care and moved in with his grandmother, Bonnie Eloise Blanton, aka "Mawmaw," as he called her at the recent Republican National Convention. While Vance related largely humorous anecdotes at the RNC meant to portray his grandmother as affable — darkly humorous, that is — not everything with Mawmaw was hunky-dory. At times his grandmother demonstrated some of the same impulsive violence he'd endured while living with his mother.

On one hand, Vance described his grandmother in glowing terms in the aforementioned 2017 NBC News interview. "She knew when I needed love and comfort," he said. "She knew when she needed to just be sympathetic. She was really smart." He cited her as the most positively influential figure in his life. Per NPR, at the RNC Vance said that his grandmother was a "woman of very deep Christian faith" who "also loved the F-word. ... She could make a sailor blush." 

No matter her qualities, Vance's grandmother lived through the same cycle of substance abuse, poverty, and violence that affected his entire family. She witnessed her daughter, Beverly, experience addiction same as what happened to her husband, James, Vance's grandfather and namesake. At one point Vance's grandmother got so fed up with James that she doused him in gasoline and lit him on fire — he survived. She also threatened to run over Vance's friends — a threat that he took seriously.

We already mentioned that J.D. Vance's mother and father divorced when he was 6, an event which might have helped precipitate his mother Beverly's decline into substance abuse and subsequent abusive behavior toward her son. As The New York Times quotes Vance, his mother strolled in one day and said that his father, Donald Bowman, "didn't want me anymore." "It was the saddest I had ever felt," he wrote in "Hillbilly Elegy." Moving forward through his childhood, we encounter the "revolving door" of men his mother got involved with and Vance hated.

Come Vance's teenage years, Bowman returned one day a "devoted Pentecostal," as the New York Times puts it. By all accounts it seems that Bowman was intensely religious even when he walked out on Vance and was abusive to his mother. Nonetheless, when Bowman reappeared Vance started overhauling his life in an attempt to appeal to his estranged father, who said he'd abandoned his son because he'd received signs from God telling him to do so. "I'm not sure if I liked the structure or if I just wanted to share in something that was important to him," Vance wrote in his memoir. He wound up throwing out his music, opting for Christian rock instead, and jumping online to refute evolution in chat rooms. Whether Vance realizes it or not, such a father-son dynamic constituted psychological abuse.

We already mentioned some of the violence that surrounded J.D. Vance as a kid, like when his mother got arrested or his grandmother lit his grandfather on fire. But even outside of his immediate family, Vance's Appalachian origins were defined by the type of "mountain chivalry" that led to blood feuds and unreported violence, as Stephen Bowling, the Breathitt County, Kentucky library director, told The Washington Post. In his memoir, "Hillbilly Elegy," Vance describes one such violent act committed by his uncle, Blaine Blanton Jr. 

In the anecdote, Blanton, who goes by the nickname "Uncle Pet," gets into an argument with another local man nicknamed "Big Red." After some name-calling, Vance's uncle yanks Big Red from his truck, beats him senseless, and takes an electric saw to him, carving up and down Big Red's body. Big Red — whoever he was — survived, and the crime went unreported like many others. Such violence, as The Washington Post reports, was part and parcel of "generations of abuse" that created a precedent of regional culture and values that "shaped him [Vance] and his relatives."

In a 2016 interview with NPR, Vance asserted precisely this. His interviewer summarized Vance's upbringing by saying that "violence was always a possibility, even among people who are supposed to love each other." Vance said that this is "absolutely true," and that if his mother wasn't fighting with one of her boyfriends, random locals were fighting in restaurants or on the streets.

Finally, J.D. Vance's upbringing not only included watching his mother succumb to substance abuse, the ever-present threat of violence, broken and abusive family relationships, but another factor that tied them all together: poverty. In this case Vance means generational, pervasive poverty sewn into the regional fabric of his family's history. He wrote in "Hillbilly Elegy" that his ancestors were "day laborers in the Southern slave economy, sharecroppers after that, coal miners after that, and machinists and millworkers in more recent times. Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash." 

In "Hillbilly Elegy" Jackson wrote that his birthplace, Jackson Kentucky, was "as heartbreaking as it was cliche" and full of things like "decrepit shacks rotting away" and starving, "stray dogs" begging for food. Extended, sprawling kinship groups were the norm in Jackson more than nuclear families, and everyone's habits and fortunes — bad and good — intermingled. When Vance's family moved to Middletown, Ohio they brought their habits and fortunes with them. Poverty, he said to NPR in 2016, was a "family tradition." Even today, as The Washington Post reports, Breathitt County, Kentucky — where Jackson is located — remains one of the 10 poorest counties in the United States.

And yet, it's this poverty that helped Vance escape his upbringing and go to Yale Law School, as the university offers scholarships to individuals who come from poor families. As Vance writes in "Hillbilly Elegy," he supplemented his scholarship by working as many hourly shifts as possible moving cartons of floor tiles onto pallets.