Elizabeth Catte

Elizabeth Catte is the author of What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia.

From the transcript of her interview with NPR's Kelly McEvers:

KELLY MCEVERS, HOST: Appalachia is this long, diagonal region that stretches from New York state down to Alabama - 400 counties, 25 million people. And the story of Appalachia has been told many times over the decades often by writers and photographers who travel there to show poverty and struggle. More recently during the campaign of Donald Trump, who got a lot of support in Appalachia, the story of the region was told by a writer named J.D. Vance in his book "Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir Of A Family And Culture In Crisis."

Vance wrote about his family history of drug addiction and violence. And since then, he's become a kind of spokesperson for the region. None of this sits well with Elizabeth Catte. She's an historian based in Virginia who has written a slim-but-pointed rebuttal to J.D. Vance. It's called "What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia."

ELIZABETH CATTE: There's a projection of his realities onto the lives of everybody in the region, and it's not in my mind accidental. It's right there in the subtitle of the book. It's a memoir of a family, but is also a memoir of a culture in crisis. The universalizing that is done in the book is something that's become a trademark of J.D. Vance's engagement as a pundit and a political up-and-comer. And so my book is certainly a criticism of "Hillbilly Elegy," but I'd also like it to be read as an interruption to a claim of ownership about my life and the people around me.

MCEVERS: How do you think people think of Appalachia now because of projects like this? And what would you like to tell those people? (Laughter) You know, like, what image would you like to sort of replace in their mind?

CATTE: Something very ordinary. I think the problem that we're starting to see from "Hillbilly Elegy" - and it's...[read on]

Visit Elizabeth Catte's website.

--Marshal Zeringue