The Road Out of Winter
By Alison Stine
When my novel was coming out this year, a publicist urged me to downplay the fact that the story was set in my home of Appalachian Ohio. We have Appalachia fatigue, this person based in New York advised, urging me instead to focus on the climate change storyline in the book.
Is there only so much attention we're willing to pay to stories of poverty? What if people will only listen for so long—and "Hillbilly Elegy" drowns out other voices, especially those who have a different experience than Vance's bootstraps act? ~ Alison Stine
When the book Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance hit the mainstream I was a huge fan. We read it in our book group and had, what I now see as, a pretty typical white middle-class conversation about human potential, defying the odds, and the complications of breaking the cycle of poverty.
Then I read this review of the movie written by Alison Stine for Salon.
Her pretty scathing review of the movie adaptation of Vance’s book Hillbilly Elegy made me curious about Stine’s new novel Road Out of Winter. Reading it, I was quickly drawn into her dystopian fantasy world and the story of poverty and oppression she told in a way which didn’t feed the Horatio Alger American myth. Instead, it invited me into a deeper reality, as all good mythological stories do. Stine’s novel describes a world in perpetual winter. An interesting possibility to contemplate in our current climate crisis, but also a compelling metaphor for the experience of poverty. A desperate life in a world with dwindling resources and no hope of the sustenance which feeds birth, growth, the very foundations of life.
In her review for Salon, Stine points out how Vance’s book magnifies a myth about poverty in Appalachia. I agree, it is a dangerous thing to present a person’s story in the service of a myth which serves and perpetuates oppressive stereotypes. Here' are a few of her comments:
Like Vance, I too had a grandmother from Kentucky coal country, and my parents, the first in their respective families to go to college, also raised their children in an Ohio Rust Belt town, dominated by AK Steel, the employer of Vance's Papaw. I remember when the steel workers union went on strike and posted a "Scab of the Week" sign with full names. I remember when the factory was closed.
No one who is actually poor is going to look at this movie as a roadmap, but people who are in positions of power to deny money and opportunities may. To only laugh at this movie is a mistake, and undercuts its danger, both of spreading inaccurate myths about poverty and completely overshadowing (and disbelieving) the stories of women, BIPOC, disabled people and queer people living in the region and in poverty throughout America.
But I keep coming back to what my friend said: This movie and the book that sired it not only perpetuate dangerous stereotypes about poverty, about a wide and diverse region, about women and about people struggling with addiction, but stories like these keep money and access from those who need it.
It’s interesting to me that Vance’s book is an autobiography, a true story. And Stine’s book is fiction. Because they both point to truths. Stine’s however, has not been recreated or redefined by movie-makers. Stine’s book bristles with a truth which is difficult to look at, much more complicated to accept than a traditional rags-to-riches story line. She takes us into the cold, the dark, the ugly. But I couldn’t help but hold onto the possibility of hope at the end. Not a “rags to riches” kind of hope, but instead a “tending to the wounds” kind of hope. I saw there Stine’s willingness to concede that there might still, even in the apparent hopelessness, be glimmers of light, a potential for healing. Maybe even growth. And I agree with her. That’s a different kind of truth entirely.