I have started Hillbilly Elegy and there is a heavy-handed symbol 2 minutes in.

i am traumatized, oh no fullbody flashbacks to my childhood

SCREAMING, THIS LOOKS LIKE MY NEIGHBORHOOD, GET ME OUT OF HERE.

I do love a voice over.

AHHHHH. I ALSO DIDN'T KNOW THE FORKS OR THE BREAD OR WHICH WATER WAS MINE. [leaps out of the window]

I ALSO GOT AN UPSETTING CALL RE: MY MOM'S HEALTH AT A BIG GRAD SCHOOL FUNCTION.

i hate this

OH NO, EVERYONE LOOKING AT YOU LIKE YOU'RE AN ALIEN WHEN YOU SAY YOUR SCHOOL NAME BECAUSE IT IS NOT AN IVY LEAGUE.

Oh no, them dunking on your region and saying you're in the big leagues now. [runs away screaming]

NOT HIS MAMA YELLING AT HIM AND CALLING HIM CARELESS. I AM UNABLE [flees]

As a large clumsy youth who wore husky jeans and knocked things over just by breathing in their general vicinity, this is the cringe representation i absolutely could have lived without

Wow my mom also threatened to kill us both to even petty scores when she was angry.

NOT A BP!!!! GET ME OUT OF HERE.

Mannnnnn. i am un petit uncomfortable.

@_____@ THIS IS WHY I NEVER GO HOME

I am never speaking to my family ever again.

I HAD TO BREAK INTO MY UNCLE'S TRAILER BECAUSE HE HAD BEEN MISSING FOR SEVERAL DAYS AND WE FOUND HIM FACE DOWN IN HIS OWN EXCREMENT AND HE DIED. I HATE THIS.

My poverty PTSD is overwhelming, lmfao i am going to have nightmares tonight.

THESE SCRUBS.

FRIED BOLOGNA FOR DINNER, KILL ME

Man, I don't see how the culture writers had enough emotional distance to write their articles about this movie, because I am feeling uncomfortably seen and peeled alive by it and I am going to go watch something that does not make me think of my dying relatives and their teeth.

The articles and discourse about this book and movie led me to believe that it was inaccurate trash, but from what I have seen, it is horrifyingly accurate and I do not want to see it!!!

Listen. if your family let the lightbill go two months before paying it and if you couldn't afford *69 and had an antenna instead of cable, be prepared to be upset and triggered and retraumatized.

But if your family could afford league soccer and football pads and the fifth grade trip to D.C. and also the DeSoto Caverns and if you didn't have to do extra social studies homework while everyone else go to go to the book fair, then you will be fine.

If you don't automatically think of brown extension cords come Christmas time, you will be fine.

The rest of us, however, should exercise caution, lmfao

Oh no, chubby Yale Law JD is unfortunately the type to which I fell prey before I escaped the prison of my class.

Oh no, breaking off relationships with people because of your internalized class shame and the intractability of trying to explain your toxic homelife to your new friends.

I understand some of the critiques of this film that say that Amy Adams's Bev has no real depth or mystery to her, but I also just want you to know that sometimes poverty and a lifetime of addiction flattens a person out and sometimes there is no mystery.

I don't think some of you understand the extent to which poverty really hollows out a life. And I don't mean that like cute poverty. I mean, like real, grinding generational poverty. Born at the bottom of the well and all you know is the grimy dark kind of poverty.

I think some of you think the songs and the recipes and the little rituals and the "my mom made sure we had everything we needed" narratives somehow make up for how, like, uh, desperate and empty your life feels when the sun goes down and there are no lights anywhere. Like.

And like, the impossibility of trying to fix your family when there is absolutely no fixing your family.

I do think this movie is probably craven at its heart, but it is eerily observant about a certain kind of horrible shameful poverty and I am TRIGGERED.

I mean, JD Vance is absolutely a racist. And you can tell these people would spit on a black person. But I do recognize the poverty. And I have not read his little Trumpist propaganda.

But I suspect it is also craven at its heart. And at the end of the day, this movie is probably not art. And it is probably not like, morally courageous to actually lean into the complicated reality of these people's lives to any degree that isn't merely aesthetic.

And like, once you get past the horrifying familiarity of it, it's like, what can you do other than describe the condition. What can you do other than reproduce the conditions. There is no comment. And that is the reason I think it fails.

BUT IT IS ACCURATE IN ITS DESCRIPTION.

No one got lit on fire on Christmas, but one Christmas I had to stop my mom from caving my dad's head in with a hammer because she didn't like the sound of him grinding his teeth and she kept yelling at him to stop but he was drunk and asleep and she snapped.

And the whole watching your parents try to get clean and fail to get clean and then try to get clean and fail to get clean over and over and over.

Sorry. I am not one of the other cool writers with nice parents and pictures of themselves as a child. I'm the one with the traumatic rural childhood and no family anymore.

WHEN HE GOT THE GOOD MATH GRADE, OH NO.