Hillbilly Elegy paints quite a portrait of poor white Appalachian families. He's one of the few who reached the American dream--thanks in part to his Mamaw and Papaw who raised him. Papaw quit drinking at some point, and both were harsh people, especially to those who hurt children.
Mamaw, bless her hillbilly heart, was as likely to call J.D. a "fucker" as to tell him she loved him, but on balance he adored her and she saved him from his mom's addictions and parade of different temporary father-figures. He also credits his years in the Marines between high school and college for teaching him things he never learned in poor Appalachian family or school, things as basic as how to balance a checkbook and eat nutritiously.
This was my world; a world of truly irrational behavior. We spend our way into the poorhouse. We buy giant TVs and iPads. Our children wear nice clothes thanks to high-interest credit cards and payday loans. We purchase homes we don't need, refinance them for more spending money, and declare bankruptcy, often leaving them full of garbage in our wake....
Our homes are a chaotic mess. We scream and yell at each other like we're spectators at a football game....
We don't study as children and we don't make our kids study when we're parents. Our kids perform poorly at school. We might get angry at them, but we don't give them the tools--like peace and quiet at home--to succeed."
If kids like J.D. are lucky enough to have grandparents who care for them, they have a chance of succeeding, but happiness is rarely the point of family conversations; life is more about survival and getting back at those who deserve a kick or an insult or a look down the barrel of a gun.
America The Anxious, however, is a book that has me nodding and laughing along--a book about one British woman's perceptions when she moves to California--about how our happy-hungry America is obsessed with self-improvement and the pursuit of happiness, how we feel guilty when we aren't as happy as our neighbors and how we take it as personal failure when we aren't smiley face happy.
We are, bless our hearts, trying so hard to be happy! Billions of dollars are spent annually on books and self-help programs that promise to make us happier. Yet we are not at the top of the happiness list in the world; we are quite a way down the list.
More on that next time....
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