This story was co-published by the journalism non-profit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
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“Poor people” are “my people” Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance has said. In his best-selling 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy, he claimed a similar possessiveness, while at the same time viewing this “cultural inheritance” with contempt. “You have to stop making excuses and take responsibility,” he advised the friends and family who hadn’t made it out of the holler and into the halls of Yale Law School like himself.
Vance’s blaming-and-shaming of the poor, in both the book’s pages and in the years since its publication, is unpleasant, even morally distasteful. But the by-the-bootstraps myth it promulgates—that individuals “escape” grinding poverty via personal merit, and those who remain simply haven’t worked hard enough—is not just bad politics. In fact, it’s pretty effective politics: we can see from Vance how the reactionary memoir can become the grounds for a grubby political career and a rallying cry. It is, however, bad literature.
Bootstrapping stories have long been an American pastime—think Horatio Alger—and Hillbilly Elegy reinforces their underlying implication that class inequality is a problem poor people bring on themselves. We’re used to it by now, but there is another way, a more liberatory method for telling the stories of those in poverty.
The escaped sons and daughters of poverty don’t need to deride their less fortunate peers to inflate their own self-regard. The truth is that we need fewer stories of poor people making good and more honesty about how class society itself is violence. Inspiration for these new kinds of stories can be found in the last few decades of French sociological memoirs of poverty, from the works (which some critics call “autofiction”) of Nobel Prize-winning author Annie Ernaux to recent books by Édouard Louis.
We, the authors, know this problem from the inside. One of us (Ann) writes about being working-class in America, and the other (Alissa) runs a non-profit devoted to enabling others to report stories of their own economic struggles and has just written a book called Bootstrapped. We believe the approach practiced by French writers who’ve emerged from the working-class like Ernaux, Louis, Didier Eribon, and others is preferable to the Vance narrative, which we could call that of the “class reactionary” or the “working class traitor.” American literary gatekeepers should look to what social theorist Chantal Jaquet calls the “class defector” storyline instead.
These authors are full of criticism not for their places of origin but for their adopted communities, even as they recognize and grapple with the immense privilege of having made it out.
In the “class defector” narrative, writers examine their working-class home communities in contrast to the wealthy or middle-class intellectual coterie they’ve newly joined. The “class defector” perspective ultimately enhances rather than blunts defectors’ solidarity with members of the class in which they were born. How? Because these authors are full of criticism not for their places of origin but for their adopted communities, even as they recognize and grapple with the immense privilege of having made it out—an advantage they refuse to claim as reward for any intrinsic merit.
Take Louis. The queer son of a factory worker and a homemaker, Louis grew up in a poor region in northern France where he was belittled and abused. “Be a man,” his father told him. “Don’t act like a girl, don’t be a faggot.” From a family where food was hard to come by, Louis and his cousin found solace at the supermarket where they hung out for hours every Saturday. Unable to buy anything but a can of soda, they found pleasure in being surrounded by “an infinite abundance, inaccessible.” Middle- and upper-class people attended the theater, as Louis writes in Change, but “for us, the supermarket was the dream.”
An accident in a factory left Louis’s father bedridden with a broken back, and his family had to rely on government support to make ends meet. Louis charts a series of reforms that left his family increasingly desperate and destitute, including when President Nicolas Sarkozy forced those receiving a government check back to work. Another way in which the French working-class sociological memoir is superior to American rags-to-riches self-flattery is that the former accurately presents public policy as a matter of life and death.
In his magisterial Returning to Reims, Didier Eribon similarly recounts his transformation from the son of a factory worker into a professor and intellectual in Paris. He shows how the French education system tracked working-class students into manual labor jobs. Eribon’s father had dreamed of being an industrial designer, but he was forced to “renounce his illusions” and leave school at fourteen.
Annie Ernaux writes about how she was embarrassed by everything from the public toilet in the courtyard of the family store to the small house where she slept in the same room with her parents.
The education system not only assumed that the sons of workers did not need education because they too would be ouvriers; it actively blocked alternative paths. The poor were considered a cultural contaminant. Pursuing his dreams meant surmounting institutional barriers set up to keep people in his class from stepping beyond their station. In Eribon’s view, cost-cutting policy reforms also were what led to a nationwide political shift to the right and while he condemns his own mother for voting for a far right party, he describes it as one of the few acts of resistance available to her.
The daughter of former factory workers who opened a small store, the most famous of the sociological memoirists, Annie Ernaux, writes about how she was embarrassed by everything from the public toilet in the courtyard of the family store to the small house where she slept in the same room with her parents. “It was normal to be ashamed, like a consequence of my parents’ jobs, their money problems, their background as factory workers, our way of being,” she wrote in Shame.
As a young woman, Ernaux promised herself that she would write to “avenge her kind.” Her method includes showing how the violence of the class system harms both defectors and those they leave behind. Her father is humiliated again and again when Ernaux corrects his speech and encourages him to give up the expressions and grammar that mark him as a working-class man.
After Ernaux becomes a teacher and marries a professional, she and her father have little to say to each other. Her defection is complete. “I belonged to a world that had disdained him,” she wrote in A Man’s Place. But unlike Vance, she does not share that disdain. Instead, her defection marks her as a permanent outsider and critic, wary of the privileges now conferred on her and those who, having been born into them, take them for granted.
These recent French sociological memoirs serve as antidotes to the American reactionary class memoirs, where institutions are neutral spaces, above the dirty world of political economy.
These recent French sociological memoirs serve as antidotes to the American reactionary class memoirs, where institutions are neutral spaces, above the dirty world of political economy. In Elegy, for instance, institutions simply offer lucky strivers the chance to avoid the misery to which the rest of their class cohort are destined. As Lennard David writes in “Poor Things: How Those with Money Depict Those without It,” Vance deploys “poornography,” overclaiming his connection to rural Kentucky and even to working-class deindustrialized Ohio. According to Vance, an individual’s success or failure is a result of factors “outside the government’s control.” While glossing over how he benefited from the GI Bill and his grandmother’s “old-age benefits,” his memoir and the public life he made in its image dismisses policy that might help people like his family.
We can understand why Vance wrote his memoir this way. He is an arch-conservative libertarian with extreme political ideas who wanted to make a mark in the world and write a bestseller,and also—in a heavy dose of psychological self-justification—sincerely believes his success originates from his force of will. The greater mystery is why his writing, and other books like it, has been received so favorably?
We urge a turn towards the sociological memoir, modeled by the French approach, because it challenges the myths that make the class system seem a part of the natural order. It’s personal for us. Growing up in a small town in Idaho in a Mormon family, Ann learned the lesson that social connections can do more for the aspirant than either hard work or merit. Nevertheless, she enrolled in college to become a professor and writer, which required taking on debt, moving across the country and then borrowing still more when she enrolled in graduate school.
Then, thanks in part to the financial crisis of 2008, the already exploitative and contingent academic job market went into free fall. With no jobs available, she worked part-time and temporary jobs for several years, including as an office temp and, later, during the pandemic, at a grocery store. The whole time, she worried about what she would do when her student loans came due after the Covid payment pause. All of her writing on these subjects, much of which Alissa has edited, interrogates her position both as a working-class American and a class defector. This is also the strategy at work in Eribon, Louis’s and Ernaux’s “defector” stories.
The sociological memoir, unlike the reactionary or working class traitor memoir, also shows the limits of the liberal view of poverty.
Recently, some American memoirists from financially struggling backgrounds have used a technique reminiscent of the “class defector” method. US sociological autobiographies like Acceptance, Mill Town, and The Forgotten Girls are positive signs for a genre that reached its nadir with Elegy. Generally, memoirists are in a position to show that social class is neither a form of discrimination nor a different identity nor a subculture. Class is how society is organized under capitalism, and it is a form of domination.
The sociological memoir, unlike the reactionary or working class traitor memoir, also shows the limits of the liberal view of poverty. As Walter Benn Michaels wrote in the London Review of Books, “Where right neoliberals want us to condemn the culture of the poor, left neoliberals want us to appreciate it.” But no one should appreciate poverty or its effects. Simply urging politeness around class leaves inequality and its stigmas entirely intact. The sociological memoir understands this.
Vance, in contrast, recognizes that his trauma could be repackaged as a commodity but he also deploys every one of his personal stories of overcoming harrowing situations as proof that anyone can succeed if they merely want it. The implication, of course, is that those who remain in poverty just don’t want out bad enough—an insinuation that Vance makes explicit when cites a lack of drive and initiative among the people he grew up with.
At Yale Law School, Vance learned which fork to use at upper-class dinners while learning how to make “important” allies like his former employer, tech billionaire Peter Thiel. What we might call the hustle of the highly educated and downwardly mobile is the reality for millions. It is what Educated author Tara Westover called a “no-win scenario.” When class inequality feels natural, it is less possible to speak and write openly about it without sounding more bitter than analytical. It’s alarming when both the reactionary memoir and the American Dream itself serve the same conservative political goals.
The class defector memoir anatomizes the forces that have created the authors’ familial struggle while also highlighting the problems and prejudices of the upper middle class to which these authors escaped. This is the genre that liberates us from our secret, privately-held shame: of being subjects trapped in a class society. We are freed by recognizing first and foremost that our position in the structure is not our choice alone.
