The memoir’s narrator and its chief subject. Brown-haired, blue-eyed, and borne of one-generation-removed Kentucky hillbilly stock, Vance grows up chiefly in Middletown, Ohio, with stints in other parts of Ohio and Kentucky. A string of adverse childhood experiences relating to his mother’s drug abuse and domestic violence often make him depressed or act out. Shuttled between homes growing up, Vance graduates from high school and enlists in the Marines. When he is done with his tour, he attends Ohio State University, followed by Yale Law School.

A self-identified conservative and Christian, Vance spends his youth enjoying the same things many American boys of his generation do: rock records, football, the card game Magic, and playing outside in his family’s native Kentucky. Despite overcoming myriad obstacles and finding his sense of self through the Marines, self-doubt often plagues him, and he yearns, throughout the memoir, for white, working-class America to work harder to better its collective self, while also believing public policy reform is needed if the plight of Appalachians is going to change.