Vice President JD Vance’s memoir was used to smuggle drugs into prison, a court heard.
Hillbilly Elegy launched Vance into political life, partly through a sensitive depiction of Appalachian despair and addiction.
Now, a copy of the 2016 The New York Times bestseller has been sprayed with narcotics by Austin Siebert, 30, and sent to an inmate disguised as an Amazon order.
It was bound for an unnamed inmate at Grafton Correctional Institution in Ohio, Vance’s home state, along with a drug-laced piece of paper and a 2019 edition of the GRE Handbook.
Siebert, of Maumee, near Toledo, was sentenced to more than 11 years and 8 months behind bars on Nov. 18.
He was convicted of spraying them with narcotics and shipping them to the correctional facility by U.S. District Judge Donald C. Nugent.
According to the Associated Press, a conversation between the inmate and Siebert was caught on tape, with the unnamed inmate heard saying, “Is it Hillbilly?”
Siebert then replies, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He then seems to remember, and the reference twigs. “Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s the book, the book I’m reading. [Expletive] romance novel.”
Addiction is a strong theme in Hillbilly Elegy, which explores the now-41-year-old’s life growing up in white working-class poverty.
It touches on themes of despair at both the familial and cultural levels and explores a sense of abandonment in the Appalachian region. The “Hillbilly Highway,” which saw people flock to the Midwest after WWII in search of employment, and the reality of the American dream, both feature.
It also went some way in explaining the political rise of Donald Trump.
Released in 2016, it spent over a year in the NYT’s top 100 and became a window into voting patterns during the 2016 election, which saw Trump ascend to the White House for the first time.
In her 2016 review, New York Times reviewer Jennifer Senior said Vance offered “a compassionate, discerning sociological analysis of the white underclass that has helped drive the politics of rebellion, particularly the ascent of Donald J. Trump.”
She added, “Combining thoughtful inquiry with firsthand experience, Mr. Vance has inadvertently provided a civilized reference guide for an uncivilized election, and he’s done so in a vocabulary intelligible to both Democrats and Republicans.”
In 2020, it was adapted into a film by Ron Howard, starring Glenn Close and Amy Adams.
Vance’s private life has been making headlines again in November after his wife, Usha Vance, was spotted without her wedding ring. The 39-year-old visited the Marine Corps facility in North Carolina on Wednesday with first lady Melania Trump, and cameras caught her without her band.
A spokesperson for Vance told People she is “a mother of three young children, who does a lot of dishes, gives lots of baths, and forgets her ring sometimes.”
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