Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture

Hotels function as a sanctuary of last resort throughout the memoir, especially for Vance’s female family members, when they seek exit from an abusive relationship. Toward the end of the book, Vance pays for a week’s worth of nights at a Middletown hotel, so that his mother, now unemployed and addicted to heroin, will not go homeless. More implicitly, hotels reinforce the transitory nature of Vance’s youth, as he moves from home to home in Ohio and Kentucky.

If one of the book’s central themes is migration, and especially “out-migration” by Kentucky Appalachians to parts of the Midwest and beyond, then US Route 23 is that out-migration’s prime motif. While its chief, explicit reference occurs at the end of Chapter 2, its presence is felt throughout the memoir, as family members travel back and forth between Ohio and Kentucky. Before Lyndon Johnson expanded America’s highway and freeway infrastructure, US Route 23 was the primary route between Jackson, Kentucky, and Ohio, and a road well-worn by waves of Kentucky emigrants seeking a better life outside the “holler.”