Last month, after I published an article about the Republican Vice-Presidential candidate J. D. Vance and his fixation on the traditional nuclear family, I received an e-mail from Donna Morel, an attorney in San Diego. Morel is a fact-checking hobbyist—notably, she exposed major fabrications in best-selling books by the late celebrity biographer C. David Heymann. After Donald Trump named Vance as his running mate, Morel had begun looking closely at “Hillbilly Elegy,” the 2016 memoir that brought Vance to national prominence and provided the springboard for his foray into politics. Morel suspected that the book was “a little too made for Hollywood,” she told me—in 2020, it was adapted into a movie starring Glenn Close and Amy Adams—and she wanted to see if her hunch was correct.
Vance, it must be stressed, is no C. David Heymann. Judging by what Morel has unearthed from the archives, Vance has blurred some details, perhaps unintentionally, in a manner that likely comports with most memoirs, especially those that rely heavily on family lore. Vance is careful to acknowledge spots in “Elegy” where he may not have all the facts in place; in the introduction, he writes, “I am sure this story is as fallible as any human memory.” Still, Morel has identified discrepancies and omissions that complicate the family narrative upon which Vance has based so much of his conservative politics and ideology. Some of what was left out of “Elegy” undermines Vance’s larger political project, in which matrimony and the nuclear family are the foundation of a civil society that stigmatizes divorce, single parenthood, same-sex marriage, and, of course, “childless cat ladies.”
“Two generations ago, my grandparents were dirt-poor and in love,” Vance writes toward the start of “Hillbilly Elegy.” “They got married and moved north in the hope of escaping the dreadful poverty around them.” Bonnie and Jim Vance, who are immortalized in “Elegy” as Mamaw and Papaw, left their Appalachian home town in Kentucky in their teens, eventually settling in Middletown, Ohio, where Jim got a union job at the Armco steel mill; tragically, their first child died in infancy. (“Without the baby, would she have ever left Jackson?” Vance asks in “Elegy.” His grandmother’s “entire life—and the trajectory of our family—may have changed for a baby who lived only six days.”) Vance describes Bonnie and Jim as “alone in their new city” and “isolated” from the family they felt closest to. He allows that Jim’s mother, Goldie, was “nearby,” but that Bonnie disliked her, and that she was “mostly a stranger to her own son.”
Morel dug up census records and other documents that add nuance to this tale. “Hillbilly Elegy” doesn’t name Jim’s stepfather, Julius Blackmon, who had worked at Armco for years before Jim was hired there. (“Applicants with a family member working at Armco would move to the top of the employment list,” Vance notes in his memoir, without making the connection.) Despite any disdain that Bonnie may have felt toward her mother-in-law, Bonnie and Jim lived with Jim’s mother and stepfather at two different residences following their move to Middletown, according to the census records. Uncle Jimmy’s birth announcement, in 1951, also shows the young couple living in the Blackmon home. When Bonnie and Jim did get their own place, it was less than a mile away. And, when Julius Blackmon died, Jim was named the executor of his estate—yet another data point that contradicts the picture of estrangement that Vance sketches in “Elegy.”
None of these findings destroys the portrait of two teen-agers leaving their lives behind in Appalachia and striking out to create a better life for themselves in the industrializing Midwest. But the surprising elisions work to exaggerate Bonnie and Jim’s circumstances, putting dents in Vance’s version of their plucky, up-by-the-bootstraps story.
Bonnie and Jim’s marriage was, at times, deeply troubled—in Vance’s telling, both of his grandparents were violent, and Jim was a vicious drunk. But Vance praises them in his memoir and elsewhere for sticking it out. Later in the marriage, Vance writes in “Elegy,” they “separated and then reconciled, and although they continued to live in separate houses, they spent nearly every waking hour together.” (The relationship seems to have improved immensely, Vance observes, after Jim Vance quit drinking, in 1983.) During a 2021 talk in which Vance discussed how divorce harms children, he suggested that, following the sexual revolution of the nineteen-sixties, too many couples in flawed marriages began falling back on divorce as an easy way out, and he offered up Mamaw and Papaw as an aspirational counterexample. His grandparents, he said, “had an incredibly chaotic marriage in a lot of ways, but they never got divorced, right? They were together to the end, ’til death do us part. That was a really important thing to my grandmother and my grandfather.” By the nineteen-seventies and eighties, Vance told his audience, couples were more likely to see marriage as a “basic contract,” one that could be entered into and exited with ease, even caprice:
According to records sourced by Morel, Bonnie and Jim—Vance’s flawed but heroic avatars of traditional marriage—entered divorce proceedings twice. In the first instance, according to court documents and also an announcement in the March 22, 1955, edition of the Middletown Recorder, Bonnie, then twenty-one, filed for divorce from Jim on grounds of “extreme cruelty” and “gross neglect of duty.” Joseph Nigh, a family-law attorney in Columbus, Ohio, told me that “ ‘extreme cruelty’ is a broad spectrum,” and can encompass physical assault, verbal abuse, or “demeaning conduct.” “Gross neglect of duty” is even more of a catchall term, Nigh said, intended to be left to a court’s broad discretion. (Nigh spoke with me about Ohio family law as a general matter, and did not address the Vance case specifically.)
The timing of Bonnie’s divorce petition is out of step with “Elegy,” in which Vance’s Uncle Jimmy compares the early years of his parents’ marriage to “Leave It to Beaver,” and says that, while their bond was always volatile, before the nineteen-sixties, “they were united, they were getting along with each other.” In the divorce petition, Bonnie asked the court for a restraining order against Jim as well as alimony, child support, and custody of three-year-old Jimmy. In August, 1957, the divorce filing was dismissed “without record,” leaving no documented clue as to why. Bonnie and Jim went on to have two more children.
Taylor Van Kirk, a spokeswoman for Vance, said, in an e-mailed statement, “JD’s grandparents lived difficult lives amid struggles with poverty, miscarriages, and alcoholism. But in their later years, they became overwhelmingly positive forces in the lives of their children. The decision for a married couple to divorce is deeply personal and individual—JD respects those decisions.” A representative for Vance also cited recent comments that the candidate made on Fox News in which he stressed that he has never “supported women staying in violent marriages.”
It’s entirely possible that Bonnie and Jim Vance reconciled because of their commitment to the sanctity of marriage. But it’s also useful to place Mamaw and Papaw’s first aborted divorce—which goes unmentioned in “Hillbilly Elegy”—in some historical context. Before the state of Ohio introduced no-fault divorce, in 1974, anyone unilaterally seeking a divorce needed to prove that her spouse had committed a misdeed that was enumerated in Ohio’s divorce code; in addition to “extreme cruelty” and “gross neglect of duty,” these faults included adultery, bigamy, impotence, and “habitual drunkenness.” Prosecuting such a case against one’s spouse required money and resources. In seeking divorce, “the problem that so many women had was that they weren’t financially independent from their husbands,” Elaine Tyler May, a professor emerita of history and American studies at the University of Minnesota, said. “It’s not a coincidence that divorce rates went up as an increasing number of women began working outside the home and were able to support themselves.” (Bonnie Vance, it might be noted, was not employed, did not complete middle school, and did not seem to have any family in Ohio.)
Vance is correct that the nationwide advent of no-fault divorce in the nineteen-seventies did make marriage more akin to a “basic contract.” But a range of statistics drawn from subsequent decades is highly suggestive of the kinds of contracts that some women wanted to break. Research by the economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers has shown that, as no-fault divorce became the norm in state after state, domestic-violence rates dropped by some thirty per cent, suicides among women dropped by as much as sixteen per cent, and the number of women murdered by their partners dropped by ten per cent.
In 2020, Vance, who had recently been baptized and confirmed as a Catholic, published an essay in the Catholic journal The Lamp about how his grandmother influenced his decision to convert. “I felt desperate for a worldview that understood our bad behavior as simultaneously social and individual, structural and moral,” he wrote. The philosophy he craved, Vance went on, “could speak against rising rates of divorce and addiction, not as sanitized conclusions about their negative social externalities, but with moral outrage. And I realized, eventually, that I had already been exposed to that worldview: it was my Mamaw’s Christianity.”
Divorce rates have not been rising for some time—they peaked in the U.S. at the turn of the eighties, before Vance was born. Still, it is his prerogative to imagine that his grandmother might have felt a sense of moral outrage about the evolution of divorce law. And Vance’s reader is free to feel a sense of moral outrage on behalf of any young mother of the nineteen-fifties who might have sought to escape a marriage that was characterized by “extreme cruelty.”
A quarter century after Bonnie Vance’s first divorce petition was dismissed, her marriage appears to have reached another breaking point. According to a decree that Morel procured from a court in Butler County, Ohio, Jim filed for divorce from Bonnie; Bonnie filed a counterclaim, and, in 1981—incidentally, around the time that the rate of divorce in the U.S. reached its historical apex—the court found Jim “guilty of gross neglect of duty.” Still, the couple did not divorce. Instead, they legally separated. Nigh, the Ohio family-law attorney, said that a couple might pursue a legal separation instead of a divorce if one or both spouses had religious objections to divorce, for example, or if there was a question of one spouse forfeiting health-insurance coverage. Yet, despite these considerations, “it’s very rarely used,” Nigh said. “In nineteen-plus years of practicing, I’ve only done one or two legal separations.”
The decree ordered that the “parties to said contract shall live separate and apart,” and Jim was required to pay Bonnie seven hundred dollars a month in alimony. He also had to “relinquish all claim” to “the family residence,” cede property he co-owned with Bonnie’s brother to their mother, and hand over the title of the 1980 Buick to Bonnie, even as he continued to make the monthly payments on it. Yet the “marriage contract” between them, the decree states, “shall continue in full force and effect.” Mamaw and Papaw may have looked and sounded divorced. But, technically, they never did give up their claim to “ ’til death do us part.” ♦
