86 pages • 2 hours read
Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture
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Chapters 9-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 9 Summary
Chapter 9 begins with Vance’s descent into depressive isolation worsening. His mother demands he provide her with clean urine, so she can pass a urinalysis and keep her nursing job. Vance explodes, calling both his mom and Mamaw out on their poor parenting, then admitting to Mamaw that his own urine may not be drug-free due to experimenting with Ken’s marijuana. Mamaw assuages these concerns and persuades Vance to give his urine to Bev.
By the end of his sophomore year, Bev has moved out of Ken’s home, and Vance is living with Mamaw in Middletown. Vance provides more detail on Mamaw, explaining why she returns to Kentucky less and less throughout her life. “It was the place where she sometimes went hungry as a child, from which she ran in the wake of a teenage pregnancy scandal, and where too many of her friends had given their lives to the mines. I wanted to escape to Jackson; she had escaped from it” (134).
Vance enjoys living with Mamaw and sees Lindsay and her son, Kameron, often. Mamaw undergoes unnecessary back surgery for a broken hip, demanding the family bring her Taco Bell while she recoups in a rest home. His relationship with his mother is tenuous. “Sometimes I’d see Mom every few days, and sometimes I’d go a couple of weeks without hearing from her at all” (136).
Vance gets a job bagging groceries at the local grocery store, Dillman’s, and begins reading sociology books about public policy and the working poor, interspersing his own findings with his perception of Mamaw’s political views. “Depending on her mood, Mamaw was a radical conservative or a European-style social Democrat” (142).
Chapter 10 Summary
Vance lives with Mamaw through high school, and he recalls being very happy during this period in his life. The summer before his senior year, Vance quits the grocery store and gets a job at the golf course, in the hope of making the varsity golf team. He fails to do so, though learns more about class divides through the experience. Vance applies to only two colleges: Miami University and Ohio State University. He settles on Ohio State and puzzles through financial aid material with Mamaw.
Worried about money, but more worried about his perceived lack of readiness for higher education, Vance decides to join the Marines, on the advice of a cousin who is a Marine Corps veteran. Vance’s family scoffs, but eventually agrees with the choice, save for Mamaw, who is uncertain Vance can make it through. A Marine Corps recruiter arrives at Mamaw’s house, to help alleviate her concerns. Upon his arrival, Mamaw greets him, “Set one foot on my fucking porch and I’ll blow it off” (158).
Vance’s 13-week boot camp is at Paris Island in South Carolina. The “sixty-nine members of [his] boot camp platoon” are “black, white, and Hispanic kids; rich kids from upstate New York and poor kids from West Virginia; Catholics, Jews, Protestants, and even a few atheists” (160).
Vance completes boot camp, “a life-defining challenge” (163), and returns home to Middletown, finding Mamaw frailer than when he left. His platoon departs for Iraq; Vance sends money he wins via online gambling home to Mamaw to help her with her bills. While on base, stateside, Vance learns Mamaw has suffered a collapsed lung and is in a coma in the hospital. He drives home to Middletown. The doctors tell Vance and his family Mamaw has a severe infection and is not responding to treatment—without a feeding tube and ventilator, she will die. Aunt Wee decides to pull her life support, and Mamaw passes away after a three-hour fight.
Vance returns to North Carolina. In Iraq, he served as a public affairs marine, part of a civil affairs unit that does community outreach. After his tour, in North Carolina, he works as a public affairs liaison, replacing a senior official and working in his stead for nine months. Vance is discharged, returns to Middletown, and begins undergraduate work at Ohio State three weeks later.
Chapter 9-10 Analysis
The Chapter 9 episode of Vance’s mother demanding that her son provide her with urine is a breaking point for Vance; after this, his mother’s role in his life seems to lessen considerably, recalling the theme of Societal Laws Versus Family Loyalty. Vance is used to bending or breaking the law to help his mother, but at this point, he can no longer rationalize that behavior. His own experimentation with drug use shows how easily he could slip into the same self-destructive patterns that his mother and many others in his family and community experience. Getting away from that environment distances him from these negative influences, but it also means his mother might suffer legal consequences if she cannot pass her drug test. Having to make these kinds of decisions is why Vance claims that even if a person makes it out of poverty, they can never leave their trauma behind.
The results of leaving are largely positive for Vance: his last three years of high school, on the surface, at least, are unremarkable: he goes to school, he works a job, and he helps out Mamaw, whom he lives with for these three years, with chores around the house.
Vance begins to perceive Mamaw not just as a caregiver, but as an individual, and comes to understand more about the person she is, and that her perception of Kentucky as a place she successfully escaped from contrasts with his perception of Kentucky as a place to escape to, as it did not harbor the domestic strife and daily chaos of his numerous Ohio homes. The fact that he can see Mamaw as an individual outside her caregiver role proves he is moving further along in his maturation journey.
Vance provides more about Bev and his feelings toward her. “Mom tried, in her own way […] Mom equated money with affection […] I just wanted her to be healthy” (136). Vance tells how Mamaw spent an exorbitant amount of money for a graphing calculator—another example of how important education was to the parental figures in Vance’s life.
These chapters foreground the theme of Personal Versus Societal Responsibility for the Disenfranchised. Vance finds wisdom in many of Mamaw’s contradictions, regarding how she perceives societal problems and ills, and that his outlook also possesses such contradictions:
I had spent so long just surviving my world, but now that I had a little space to observe it, I began to see the world as Mamaw did. I was scared, confused, angry and heartbroken. I’d blame large businesses for closing up shop and moving overseas, and then I’d wonder if I might have done the same thing. I’d curse our government for not helping enough, and then I’d wonder if, in its attempts to help, it actually made the problem worse (142).
Chapter 10 arguably marks the two most important events in Vance’s life up to this point: his enlistment in the Marine Corps and Mamaw’s death. If it is Mamaw who affords Vance the ability to believe in himself more than any other adult around him, it is ironic that Mamaw is also the single person opposed to Vance entering the Marines. At the same time, it is Vance’s enlistment that puts him in a position to build effectively from those lessons taught to him and apply them to the academic challenges he will soon face.
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