'Hillbilly Elegy' recharts on Netflix, bestsellers lists after JD Vance VP announcement

Sen. JD Vance’s bestselling memoir and its movie adaptation skyrocketed in popularity after former President Donald Trump announced him as his pick for vice president on Monday.

Hillbilly Elegy, Vance’s book about the Appalachian values of his Kentuckian family members and the socioeconomic problems in his Ohio hometown, is now at the top of the Amazon Best Sellers chart. The 2020 film adaptation of the same name became the No. 6 most-watched movie on Netflix on Tuesday.

Here’s what to know about Hillbilly Elegy.

The 2016 book

At the time Hillbilly Elegy was published, Vance was a Yale law graduate and venture capitalist who left behind a tumultuous upbringing surrounded by violence and substance abuse to escape a “grim future,” which he explores in his memoir. The book was on the New York Times bestseller list for 54 weeks and catapulted Vance to media stardom. Vance was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2022, and his memoir is widely credited as the start of his political career.

It was critically acclaimed for providing insight into how Appalachia shifted from reliably Democratic to Republican, and for noting how cultural habits might affect socioeconomic status. A New York Times book review said it was a “compassionate, discerning sociological analysis of the white underclass that has helped drive the politics of rebellion, particularly the ascent of Donald J. Trump.”

In the years since its publication, some critics have said the book reinforces stereotypes that Appalachians and members of the working class are lazy and to blame for their own economic and addiction issues.

Now that Vance is officially on the Republican presidential ticket, the book has sold at least 1.6 million copies, according to Circana Bookscan, a publishing data company that tracks around 85% of hardcover and paperback sales. Hours after Trump’s announcement, Vance’s book jumped from No. 220 on Amazon’s bestselling books list to No. 1, according to the Associated Press. The paperback remains the top book on the chart as of Wednesday afternoon, with the hardcover version at No. 2.

The book social networking site Goodreads temporarily restricted users’ ability to submit ratings and reviews for Hillbilly Elegy, instead showing an alert that states there is “unusual behavior that doesn’t follow our review guidelines” — something the site has deployed in the past after a book or author receives high volumes of traffic to prevent “review bombing.”

The 2020 movie adaptation

The Hillbilly Elegy movie, which is available to stream on Netflix, was watched for 19.2 million minutes on Monday, according to data from research company Luminate. That’s a 1,179% increase from the day before. By Tuesday, Hillbilly Elegy was among the top 10 most-watched films on the platform.

In 2020, Vance told The Federalist that he “didn’t want to actually make a movie out of the book” at first because he was worried about losing “creative control,” but ultimately he decided that he trusted director Ron Howard and thinks he’s a “good person.”

Howard told Variety in 2022 that he was surprised about Vance’s political ambitions when he ran for the Senate.

"When I was getting to know JD," said Howard, "we didn’t talk politics because I wasn’t interested in that about his life. I was interested in his childhood and navigating the particulars of his family and his culture, so that’s what we focused on in our conversation."

When the Hillbilly Elegy film came out in November 2020, it received mostly negative reviews, though actor Glenn Close received an Oscar nomination for her portrayal of Vance’s grandmother, Mamaw. She also received a nomination at the Razzie Awards, which jokingly honors the worst performances of the year. The movie now has a 25% rating among critics on Rotten Tomatoes.

Upon its release, Vox panned the movie as “a rich person’s idea of what it is like to be a poor person,” and AV Club called it “bootstrapping poverty porn" that "reinforces the stereotypes it insists it’s illuminating,” in critiques similar to the ones elicited by the book that the movie is based on. Other critics called it “overly safe,”“laughably horrendous” and “awards bait.” It was released on a streaming platform toward the end of a year marred by COVID-related shutdowns, in which many highly anticipated movies were delayed until theaters widely reopened.

The movie might not have been as well received as the book when it came out, but with Vance’s rise to political stardom, Hillbilly Elegy is seeing a huge resurgence in all of its forms.