J.D. Vance, A Product of Book Publishing
From Bestselling Author to U.S. Vice Presidential Nominee
Biggest News in Books: A Book Publishing Elegy
This week book publishing has the rare legitimate claim to national headlines as J.D. Vance, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Hillbilly Elegy turned Ohio State Senator, was named Donald Trump’s vice-presidential running mate for the upcoming election.
In America, the genre of political memoir is usually reserved as a kind of capstone or ancillary part of a politician’s whole program. Politicians typically write these “memoirs” as glorified campaign stump speeches or manifestos. They take to book publishing when they have already won an election or have already received a healthy amount national attention. They do this because even in the internet age, in a sea of more effective and wide-reaching forms of media, books still carry cultural importance. They legitimize. TV, film, print journalism and, certainly, social media just can’t match the authority of the written word between two covers. More practically, a book is also always a good peg for media to bring someone on their podcast, newscast or late-night show. And finally, in the bygone era of public accountability, where voters cared about public officials and where the money flowing into their bank accounts came from, book publishing has also historically been one of the clean ways to make money as a public servant or elected official. But even with all of these reasons for politicians to publish, books have always been a secondary force in politics—something that builds a career, not that makes one. The exception that proves this rule is J.D. Vance.
J.D. Vance’s 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy is a multiple million copy bestseller and is essentially a rags-to-riches story. In a nutshell, Vance grew up in Appalachia (or Vance bends the truth and says so), one of the poorest regions in the United States, and eventually went to Yale Law school, one of the richest and most prestigious universities in the country. One of the most successful memoirs of the century, the book has spent many, many weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. It was also adapted into a film starring Amy Adams. Before the book, Vance was an unknown entity; eight years after Hillbilly Elegy’s publication he could be one degree removed from being President of the United States.
Timing is Everything
One way of breaking down why a book is successful is looking at three factors: opportunity, execution, and timing. Opportunity is what you look at before you get an author into the book publishing machine. What is the author’s authority to speak on the subject? What is their platform? What is the demand for a book on this subject? etc. Execution is how well the book turns out through the editorial process and how effective the publisher is at publicizing and marketing the book. And finally, there is timing, the least controllable element of the three—when does the book hit shelves to maximize media and reader interest?
Hillbilly Elegy maxed out on this third factor— timing — in a way that is rarely seen. A memoir from a civilian is probably one of the most difficult categories in books (opportunity), but Vance’s memoir published into the perfect storm, the shocking rise and upset victory of Trump’s first election in 2016. The book was doing well before Trump won the election, selling thousands of copies, largely off the back of trying to understand his rise, but it was post-election when the book was sent into rarified air, spiking to 40,000-60,000 copies a week at its height. These are truly unreal numbers for a memoir by a non-famous person (and even for many famous ones). Vance’s success in publishing as much a Black Swan event as Trump’s win.
In context, Vance’s memoir took off in 2016 as the center and left-of-center media especially tried to understand the upset election. A narrative and media cycle quickly codified around “angry poor white voters” who won Trump the election. This turned out not to be true, as Ta-Nehisi Coates pointed out and statistics backed up. Rather, Trump won with pretty much every demographic of white voter and had extremely strong support among wealthy white voters, not just poor ones. That reality didn’t stop Hillbilly Elegy from catapulting to the top of the bestseller list, and earning a plethora of praise based on this narrative: The New York Times called it “a compassionate, discerning sociological analysis of the white underclass”; The Huffington Post “[a] poignant look at life in the very places where the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee has garnered the strongest support”; and the Financial Times said the quiet part loud, “Donald Trump’s name appears nowhere in this book. Yet what he stands for — a proud, know-nothing middle finger at the urban elites — haunts these pages.” Vance truly hit the timing jackpot.
There is, however, a certain irony to Vance’s rise. Namely that book publishing, a fairly progressive, left-of-center kind of industry, along with newsprint journalism (ditto) were most directly responsible for Vance’s ascension to national stardom. Albeit the company that published the book (HarperCollins) is owned by Rupert Murdoch who owns Fox News. But given the manner in which it was published and the reception of the book in general, Hillbilly Elegy wasn’t published or seen as a right-wing screed, ala Mark Levin, the kind of book that now dominates the conservative side of publishing. Nonetheless, the book gave Vance a national audience and name recognition. He became a CNN contributor. Eventually this was the base that he would run on. I’m plenty guilty of often taking a skeptical and snarky view of the influence of books on society in the 21st century, but Hillbilly Elegy shows the cultural sway the written word can still have.
Execution
I tried to read, or more accurately, listen to Hillbilly Elegy around two years ago. It was a book that — as many are feeling now (this week it has hit #1 and #2 on Amazon’s sales charts) in light of the VP announcement — I had to read for pure reason of knowing what so many other people had read. I got through about an hour of the audiobook before quitting. As a work of literature and memoir, it is lacking in some basic ways—dealing in many generalities rather than scene or strong sensory memories as the greatest coming-of-age memoirs do. This is far from an exceptionally executed book, one that I couldn’t recommend even for rubbernecking purposes.
Reading Hillbilly Elegy with some distance from its initial publication made the political bent and lens of the book glaring. The primary difference between a good literary memoir and a political memoir is that a literary memoir aims to lay out the reality of someone’s life as they understand it and let the reader decide what it means, whereas a political memoir uses one’s life experience to make a point. All kudos to Hari Kunzru of The Guardian who sniffed out the skew of Hillbilly Elegy early (although as he notes, others had too) in 2016 when others were fawning over the book, writing:
“As more than one reviewer has pointed out, Vance’s stories of hillbilly pathology are peculiarly reminiscent of the 'welfare queen' stories deployed against black people during the Reagan years to justify his assault on the social safety net ... Readers looking to understand the class fault lines within white America will be enlightened by Vance’s narrative of class mobility, but as a guide to the new political terrain Hillbilly Elegy is uneven, and frustratingly silent about the writer’s real commitments.”
As it turned out “the writer’s real commitments” would turn out to be, unsurprisingly in hindsight, right wing politics. Vance largely analyzes his adolescent experiences through a conservative lens, highlighting the individual’s responsibility for their own plight or success while bashing — rather generically — elitism at every turn. Whereas it was easy to see, from a different angle, how he could have easily interpreted the relative advantages he had to his peers (grandparents who offered him more stability) and the intuitional support he received (from public institutions and then Yale) as a way in which society, not only his free will, helped him climb the economic and social ladder.
Vance rising from the support of book publishing and the center/center-of-right media started as a politician appealing to this part of the political spectrum. In even a greater fit of irony, he was trying to cater to the establishment that made him (Yale, Publishing, Journalism). He started out as a down-the-middle, vehemently anti-, never-Trump republican. Until, like many of his era, he sold out for a chance to kiss the robes. Or as Reuters best puts it: “J.D. Vance once compared Trump to Hitler. Now they are running mates.” Vance hard flipped his platform to the Trump way — pro Putin, anti-abortion, and more bluster — won a seat on the senate and the rest as they say…Vance went form book publishing darling, Ivy League tower, and Silicon Valley to the face of the electorate that he once was asked to explain and derided for their “hillbilly culture” as a reason for both their anger and struggles.
Hillbilly Elegy was always a political memoir, a manifesto, long before most realized it was. But, like most political memoirs, Vance’s book does not seek to find beauty in truth, only to be an ancillary tool in a larger, ever-shifting agenda that has little to do with communicating one’s personal experience as a window into universal.