Donald Trump‘s choice to be his vice president did not take a traditional path into politics.
JD Vance, 39, a former Marine, who served in Iraq, and Yale Law School graduate, worked in finance under Republican super donor Peter Thiel before the publication of his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy.
Vance’s bestseller about his roots in rural Kentucky and blue-collar Ohio made him a national celebrity soon after its publication in the summer of 2016, and became a cultural talking point after Trump’s stunning victory that November.
Before filming on the movie even started, Netflix paid Imagine $45 million for the exclusive screening rights in January 2019. The move debuted on the streaming platform in November 2020.
After the announcement that Vance would be on the ticket with Trump for November’s showdown election with President Joe Biden, the movie became the third most streamed movie on Netflix.
Vance has a colorful family: Mamaw (grandmother) douses the sleeping Papaw with gasoline and drops a lit match to punish his carousing, he escaped with minor burns, and his mother’s own problems with spreading substance abuse lead her to Rollerblade through a hospital emergency room.
At one point, she badgers her son into providing a urine sample for her drug test. He was adopted by his mother’s third husband at one point.
His father abandoned the family when Vance was just a toddler, which led to him being surrounded by a series of stepfathers.
‘It was the saddest I had ever felt. Of all the things I hated about my childhood… nothing compared to the revolving door of father figures,’ he wrote in his book.
Eventually, Vance and his sister, Lindsey, are taken in by the their grandparent, adopting their last name.
He learns early to fight to defend family honor, while coping with a chaotic home life.
With his tough Mamaw’s support, he went on to serve in the Marines, including in Iraq, and to success at Ohio State University, at Yale Law School, and in a Silicon Valley investment firm.
Vance writes that both of his grandparents were socially conservative Democrat voters, Mamaw, who passed away in 2005, had an affinity in particular for Bill Clinton.
At Yale, Vance wrote that he felt as though he suffered from imposter syndrome.
‘I lived among the newly christened members of what folks back home pejoratively call the “elites,” and by every outward appearance, I was one of them: I am a stale, white, straight male. I have never felt out of place in my entire life. But I did at Yale.’
It was at the Ivy League school that Vance met his wife, Usha. The pair married in 2013 in Kentucky. His wife clerked for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, when he was a District Court judge between 2014 and 2015.
In 2017, the couple moved back to Ohio and continued to work in venture capital. The couple has three children together Ewan, Vivek and Mirabel.
Vance has regularly praised his wife as a ‘powerful female voice’ and ‘so impressive.’
In Hillbilly Elegy, Vance reflects on the transformation of Appalachia from reliably Democratic to reliably Republican, sharing stories about his chaotic family life and about communities that had declined and seemed to lose hope.
Vance first thought of the book while studying at Yale Law School, and completed it in his early 30s, when it was eventually published by HarperCollins.
Vance began writing his autobiographical tale when he was just 31. He spoke about the reasons for this in a 2016 interview with the Associated Press.
‘I was very bugged by this question of why there weren’t more kids like me at places like Yale … why isn’t there more upward mobility in the United States?,’ the senator from Ohio said.
‘I felt that if I wrote a very forthright, and sometimes painful, book, that it would open people’s eyes to the very real matrix of these problems. If I wrote a more abstract or esoteric essay.’
‘Then not as many people would pay attention to it because they would assume I was just another academic spouting off, and not someone who’s looked at these problems in a very personal way.’
