Netflix announced a new movie yesterday, Hillbilly Elegy, based on JD Vance’s memoir of the same name and dropping November 24. The book is not good, as Bob Hutton has explained. But interest in the book, and now surely the movie, speaks to a curiosity from large swaths of the country about what the hell goes on down there in the South, in Appalachia, in the foothills of those smoke-covered mountains.
I have no clue why anyone would seek out answers to such questions from JD Vance, a right-wing venture capitalist, when Dolly Parton exists and has been singing about the realities of life in Appalachia for more than five decades.
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