He insists Thiel’s reputation is unfounded, claiming he is “super thoughtful and incredibly nice”. Vance, who did not vote for Trump, says he’s never had a meaningful discussion with his boss about the incoming president. Thiel has become a pariah in liberal Silicon Valley after backing Trump and aiding his presidential transition. He says he met Thiel during a talk the tech entrepreneur gave at Yale and emailed him years later asking for work. The book finishes before it can tell the next chapter of Vance’s life: his relocation to Silicon Valley and his move, around April of last year, from the biotech firm to Mithril Capital, the venture capitalist firm founded by controversial billionaire Peter Thiel. The memoir ends shortly after Vance graduates from Yale, where he has learned how to exploit networks and connections that many students at Ivy League schools acquired at birth – but kids from Middletown don’t even know exist. “I call them neighbors, friends, and family.” “Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash,” he says. But he never forgot his affinity to “white Americans of Scots-Irish descent who have no college degree”, a group for whom, he argues, “poverty is the family tradition”. Vance overcame these obstacles and made it to the marines, and then Yale Law School. “And that’s something that I struggle with quite a bit.” He hopes readers realize, he adds, “that when you live the life that mom has, it necessarily leaves its scars”. “It has definitely been hard on mom,” he says of the book’s raw depiction of their family life. On another, she spirals into a rage and threatens to crash a car and kill them both. On one occasion, she demands her young son’s urine so she can pass a drug test at the hospital where she works. ![]() Their father is absent, their mother a nurse and drug addict with a constant stream of boyfriends. He and his sister are brought up by their grandparents. He belongs to a fiercely proud and loyal clan descended from rural Kentucky and spares few details recounting how the family buckled under the pressures of poverty, drugs and violence. The first is the subject of the memoir, which charts how he overcame a chaotic upbringing in Middletown, a deprived former steel town in the Ohio rust belt. This is the second time Vance’s life has been changed beyond recognition. ![]() “I would say it has changed nearly everything in my life.” “Anyone wanting to understand Trump’s rise or American inequality should read it,” said Larry Summers, the Harvard economist and Bill Clinton’s former treasury secretary. Vance, 32, is a Republican, but his writing has received accolades across the political spectrum. Though it doesn’t mention Donald Trump, Hillbilly Elegy has been hailed as a must-read prism into disaffection among America’s white working class and the rise of the new president.
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