During a Thursday conversation on CNN, author Meredith McCarroll said that J.D. Vance has offended so many people from rural America.
J.D. Vance first came onto the national scene after writing Hillbilly Elegy, a tale about his upbringing in Appalachia. He has been tapped at Donald Trump's Vice President in a measure to shore up support in that area.
There have long been claims, though, that Vance is quite inauthentic. McCarroll explained:
"I think that what happened for me and for a lot of readers was this shift that happens from first-person singular where he's — when he's telling the story ... I can follow that. I can read that, like I said, with a lot of empathy. But he does something in the book that frankly doesn't really get captured in the film, because a book is an easier format for this than a film. But he really shifts to talking about 'we' and he speaks on behalf of the entirety of Appalachia, which is something that I would never claim to do."
The author continued, "it's a 13-state region spanning 200,000 square miles with 25 million people. This is my experience and therefore, I'll tell you what we are like."
McCarroll closed:
"And that's really what offended so many people from the region. It's not only that he's saying really negative things, he's talking about the ways that Appalachian people are innately violent and that the poverty that is in certain places in Appalachia is of their own doing, he's making a claim about a huge region and that's — even if he was saying romantic things about it, I think that that would be problematic and was problematic to me. You can see the broad brush. When you do that to any group of people, can be problematic."