I’ve been reading Donald Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance’s memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.” The book, published in 2016, made The New York Times best seller list then, and since Vance was chosen by the former president the book has sold tens of thousands more copies.

“Hillbilly Elegy” has also received far from raves from an array of critics, some who don’t support Trump and some who do. One critic who’s been getting a lot of ink lately is Barbara Kingsolver, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning 2023 novel “Demon Copperhead,” which is a 21st-century retelling of “David Copperfield,” written by Charles Dickens.

Vance’s family history reads like the old story about the real life families named the Hatfields and the McCoys. And interestingly, Vance is related to these symbols of American divisiveness.

Vance’s biological father was a violent abuser of his wife, who ended up divorcing him when J.D. was a young boy. After that split, she fell into a pattern of hooking up with sociopathic boyfriends who were carbon copies of her ex. As Vance writes in his book, ” There was a parade of father figures, all of whom left me feeling empty and mistrustful.”

At another point in his childhood, Vance writes, he found religion, which thrust him into “searching for both a heavenly father and an Earthly one.”

Years later he would hook up with a man old enough, and worshiped enough, to play both roles.

The author seems to be honest about his family’s dysfunction, but he so often projects this truth onto Appalachians in general. Denigrating the whole lot of them, framing them as losers with little or no ambition to climb out of the ruts into which they allegedly dug and continue to dig themselves into.

In a radio interview I heard the other day, Kingsolver sets Vance’s blemished recollections straight. She knows the Appalachian territory well. She too grew up there. She knew people there. And she knows people now, folks she talked to when writing “Demon Copperhead.”

Most are as different from the family J.D. came from as night is from day.

My mother’s family were western Massachusetts “Hill Towners,” as mom and her mother called themselves. My mom’s clan was a mess. Men beat their wives and exposed themselves to children. They were drinkers, as were many of their wives. Children who witnessed these behaviors weren’t expected to make much of themselves.

I’ve written about mom’s side of the family in books and essays, but I’ve never projected what happened to her and her cousins onto what happened in the homes of others who lived in those hills.

J.D. Vance has made much of himself, in more ways than one. He graduated from college and went to Yale Law School. He was elected U.S. senator for the state of Ohio. And now he is hoping to become vice president of the U.S. Standing right in the shadow of the father figure he’d been waiting for for decades.

You just cannot make this kind of stuff up.

Terrence McCarthy, an Easthampton native, is a writer who now lives in North Carolina.