BREAKING: JD Vance hits #1 on NYT bestseller list with Hillbilly Elegy

According to the New York Times, since July 15, the sales on the book have skyrocketed in the United States. In the week ending July 20, after Vance was announced as the VP pick on July 15, "Hillbilly Elegy" had sold about 200,000 copies just in paperback. The week prior, the book had only sold around 1,500. The audiobook sales on his memoir have also surged since he was named the VP pick by Trump.

The book details Vance's rough childhood and relates it to the white working class in America, many of which live in what some on the coasts refer to as the "flyover states." In 2016, Rod Dreher wrote an article in the American Conservative along with an interview from Vance that crashed the site due to the amount of traffic that flocked to read "Hillbilly America: Do White Lives Matter?"

Vance wrote how he was able to escape the cultural norms of broken families, drugs, and other misfortunes that are seen as stereotypical of the white working class in America, ending up at Yale Law School. Dreher wrote that Vance "draws conclusions from it [his experience], conclusions that may be hard for some people to take. But Vance has earned the right to make those judgments. This was his life. He speaks with authority that has been extremely hard won."

Vance wrote that the book was about "what goes on in the lives of real people when the industrial economy goes south," adding, "It’s about reacting to bad circumstances in the worst way possible. It’s about a culture that increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it."

Vance wrote about working in a job, "The problems that I saw at the tile warehouse run far deeper than macroeconomic trends and policy. Too many young men immune to hard work. Good jobs impossible to fill for any length of time," Vance wrote, adding, "And a young man [one of Vance’s co-workers] with every reason to work — a wife-to-be to support and a baby on the way — carelessly tossing aside a good job with excellent health insurance. More troublingly, when it was all over, he thought something had been done to him."

Dreher identified this portion as the main core of the book, saying that Vance related the issues he saw in rural white America as being "closely related to a lack of moral agency." However, Vance wrote, talking about a friend that he had to "live in an environment that forces him to ask tough questions about himself."

The book added, "I believe we hillbillies are the toughest goddamned people on this earth. ... [But] are we tough enough to build a church that forces kids like me to engage with the world rather than withdraw from it? Are we tough enough to look ourselves in the mirror and admit that our conduct harms our children?"