Last month, after I published an article about Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance and his fixation on the traditional nuclear family, I received an email from Donna Morel, a San Diego attorney. Morel is an amateur fact-checker — notably, she uncovered major fabrications in best-selling books by the late celebrity biographer C. David Heymann. After Donald Trump picked Vance as his running mate, Morel had begun looking closely at “Hillbilly Elegy,” the 2016 memoir that made Vance nationally known and provided the springboard for his foray into politics. Morel suspected the book was “a little too made for Hollywood,” she told me — it was made into a movie in 2020, starring Glenn Close and Amy Adams — and she wanted to see if her hunch was correct.
Vance, it must be emphasized, is no C. David Heymann. Judging from what Morel has dug up from the archives, Vance has blurred out some details, perhaps unintentionally, in a way that is probably consistent with most memoirs, especially those that rely heavily on family stories. Vance is careful to mark places in “Elegy” where he may not have all the facts; in the introduction he writes, “I am sure that this story is as fallible as any human memory.” Still, Morel has identified inconsistencies and omissions that complicate the family narrative on which Vance has built so much of his conservative politics and ideology. Some of what is omitted from “Elegy” undermines Vance’s larger political project, in which marriage 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.”
“Two generations ago, my grandparents were dirt poor and in love,” Vance writes at the beginning of “Hillbilly Elegy.” “They married and moved north, hoping to escape the terrible poverty around them.” Bonnie and Jim Vance, immortalized in “Elegy” as Mamaw and Papaw, left their Appalachian hometown in Kentucky as teenagers and eventually settled in Middletown, Ohio, where Jim got a union job at the Armco steel mill; tragically, their first child died in infancy. (“Without the baby, would she ever have left Jackson?” Vance asks in “Elegy.” His grandmother’s “whole life—and the trajectory of our family—might have changed for a baby who lived only six days.”) Vance describes Bonnie and Jim as “alone in their new town” and “isolated” from the family they felt closest to. He acknowledges that Jim’s mother Goldie was “close by,” but that Bonnie did not like her and that she was “largely a stranger to her own son.”
Morel has dug up census records and other documents that add nuance to this story. In “Hillbilly Elegy,” Jim’s stepfather, Julius Blackmon, who worked at Armco for years before Jim was hired there, is not mentioned by name. (“Applicants whose family member worked at Armco moved to the top of the job list,” Vance notes in his memoir, without providing the context.) Despite the disdain Bonnie may have felt toward her mother-in-law, after moving to Middletown, Bonnie and Jim lived with Jim’s mother and stepfather in two different apartments, according to census records. Uncle Jimmy’s 1951 birth announcement also shows the young couple in the Blackmon home. When Bonnie and Jim got their own apartment, it was less than a mile away. And when Julius Blackmon died, Jim was named executor of his estate—another data point that contradicts the picture of estrangement Vance paints in “Elegy.”
None of these insights destroy the picture of two teenagers leaving their Appalachian lives behind and setting out to build a better life in the industrialized Midwest. But the surprising omissions exaggerate Bonnie and Jim’s circumstances and damage Vance’s version of their brave, self-made story.
Bonnie and Jim’s marriage was deeply troubled at times—according to Vance, both grandparents were violent, and Jim was a brutal drinker. But Vance praises them in his memoir and elsewhere for persevering. Later in the marriage, Vance writes in “Elegy,” “they separated and then reconciled, and although they continued to live in separate homes, they spent almost every waking hour together.” (The relationship seems to have improved tremendously, Vance notes, after Jim Vance quit drinking in 1983.) During a 2021 talk in which Vance spoke about how divorce harms children, he opined that after the sexual revolution of the 1960s, too many couples in flawed marriages resorted to divorce as an easy way out, and he offered Mamaw and Papaw as an aspirational counterexample. His grandparents, he said, “had an incredibly messy marriage in many ways, but they never divorced, right? They were together until the end, until death do us part. That was really important to my grandmother and grandfather.” In the 1970s and 1980s, Vance told his audience, couples tended to view marriage as a “simple contract” that could be entered into and dissolved with ease, even on a whim:
According to records provided by Morel, Bonnie and Jim – Vance’s flawed but heroic embodiments of a traditional marriage – filed for divorce twice. In the first instance, according to court documents and also an announcement in the March 22, 1955, edition of Middletown, recorderBonnie, then 21, filed for divorce from Jim, citing “extreme cruelty” and “gross neglect of duty.” Joseph Nigh, a family law attorney in Columbus, Ohio, told me that “‘extreme cruelty’ covers a broad spectrum” and can include physical violence, verbal abuse or “degrading behavior.” “Gross neglect of duty” is even more of a catch-all term, Nigh said, that should be left to the court’s broad discretion. (Nigh spoke to me about Ohio family law in general and did not specifically address the Vance case.)
The timing of Bonnie’s divorce petition doesn’t fit with “Elegy,” in which Vance’s Uncle Jimmy compares his parents’ early years of marriage to “growing up,” saying that while their bond was always unstable, before the 1960s they “were on the same page and got along.” In her divorce petition, Bonnie asked the court for a restraining order against Jim, as well as alimony, child support and custody of three-year-old Jimmy. In August 1957, the divorce petition was dismissed “without record,” so there was no documented indication why. Bonnie and Jim went on to have two more children.
Taylor Van Kirk, a spokeswoman for Vance, said in an emailed statement: “JD’s grandparents had difficult lives, struggling with poverty, miscarriages and alcoholism. But in their later years, they became tremendously positive forces in their children’s lives. A couple’s decision to divorce is a deeply personal and individual decision – JD respects those decisions.” A representative for Vance also cited recent comments by the candidate on Fox News in which he stressed that he has never “supported women who stay in abusive marriages.”
