Hillbilly Elegy

the demons of the life we left behind continue to chase us.

I spent the first eighteen years of my life pretending that everything in the world was a problem except me.

the measure of a man is how he treats the women in his family

The problem is, virtually everyone who plays by those rules fails. That week of interviews showed me that successful people are playing an entirely different game. They don’t flood the job market with résumés, hoping that some employer will grace them with an interview. They network. They email a friend of a friend to make sure their name gets the look it deserves. They have their uncles call old college buddies. They have their school’s career service office set up interviews months in advance on their behalf. They have parents tell them how to dress, what to say, and whom to schmooze.

In my immature brain, I didn’t understand the difference between intelligence and knowledge. So I assumed I was an idiot.

2014, in the richest country on earth, he wanted a little extra to eat but felt uncomfortable asking. Lord help us.

We tend to overstate and to understate, to glorify the good and ignore the bad in ourselves

Months away from graduating from Yale Law, I should have felt on top of the world. Instead, I found myself wondering the same thing I’d wondered for much of the past year: whether people like us can ever truly change.

most of all that I hadn’t escaped a goddamned thing.

described toward the end of Hillbilly Elegy—of replacing resentment with sympathy and understanding.