From the hollers of Appalachia to the halls of Yale and Harvard Law, the course of Cassie Chambers’ life is a classic American story in the Horatio Alger mode, according to Chloe Hadavas from Slate… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!
Cassie Chambers‘ new memoir Hill Women: Finding Family and a Way Forward in the Appalachian Mountains rejects the American myth that pluck and gumption can pull you out of poverty. Instead, Hill Women is a gritty, warm love letter to Appalachian communities and the resourceful women who lead them: aunts who cut off their skin cancer with a pocketknife, mothers in pain who refuse to go on disability in defiance of stereotypes of “lazy hillbillies.” Hill Women feels especially urgent now, in our post-2016, post-Hillbilly Elegy America. In a sense, Chambers is responding to the “bootstraps” narrative of J.D. Vance’s controversial memoir, which has been criticized for blaming Appalachians for their own circumstances. Hill Women shows an Appalachia that Hillbilly Elegy obscured.
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