NITW dropped during the 10 minutes the country was really into like working class rust belt appalachia whatever explainers, which is what Hillbilly Elegy is- a book written for the consumption of people who read those "parachuting into trump country" stories and nodded knowingly.

Those stories drove me up the wall. I feel like I talked about it for a solid year from like 2016-2017. Even in interviews for our game, which was extremely not an explainer and didn't care to be, we got hit with the same sorts of visiting anthropologist questions.

I've talked in the past about how one of the really good chats we had was with a journo from Youngstown who talked about how media descended in 2016 and the local press was like ok we can point you to lots of stuff and they just asked to find old white people at a diner. No joke.

I feel bad ragging on people who interviewed us for national outlets at the time because the questions were in good faith from folks who just didn't know much about it and wanted a relevant interview and honestly we're always amazed anyone cares to talk to us but it was wacky.

So Hillbilly Elegy is a book created for that, and that was the audience, and that audience has money and platforms, and it's shaping up to be some prime trash movie.

We write our stuff as if it's just going to be read by people who relate to it, and trust that it's a bigger group than we know, and we've been thankfully correct. I'm not even from here, I've just lived here over half my life so that's what I write about. Bethany is from here.

It was weird being unwitting spokespeople for like rust belty left behind whatever america for a few minutes in our little zone. We wrote the game during the Obama years in a blue state, because everything in the game was already here, then. Still is. Will be in a Biden admin too

I got a weird rep for being some sort of reactionary white trash apologist or whatever but that was mostly just b/c talking about capitalism is suspect. You can talk (poorly) about our other structures of oppression and violence but capitalism is still the good water we swim in.

And we can barely even talk about those other things without tripping over our own asses. But I and no shortage of other people can assure you that bringing up class and capitalism brings up the defenses and suspicion immediately. Still. It's been a century long US project.

The game talked about all kinds of other things but people really zoomed in on the material realities depicted in it, mostly because so many of them live it. Because most people do live it. But it's like the weather. You can complain but ah well, it's rain again today.

The best feedback, the stuff that makes me feel like that whole ordeal was worthwhile, was the literal hundreds of people at this point who got in touch and were like

"wow i'd never seen my life before in media"
"hey i'm a queer dude working the night shift at the Walmart outside of my town and this game is about me"
"hey i never knew i could name these problems and now i understand why i'm so angry"
etc.
still get them today.

Hellegy is about how a culture of poverty keeps people from pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and going on to ride segways around metro Ohio with Peter Thiel while cashing checks about your backwards origins. It flatters capitalists across party lines. Fuck off with that.

I'm proud of what we pulled off, I definitely found my own voice at least as a writer, and I'm proud to still be working in that general vein. Fuck JD Vance tho

ok i'm probably going to nuke this thread because i said nice things about myself and our work and i can't abide that but just saying