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Despite inevitable comparisons to J.D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy,” Cassie Chambers’ “Hill Women” is a memoir with a different intention—to honor her place (Owsley County, Kentucky) and her people (her Granny, her mother, and her aunt) by telling their stories.
Photo Above: Hill Women: Finding Family and a Way Forward in the Appalachian Mountains. By Cassie Chambers. Ballantine Books, 279 pp.
Spending childhood summers on her grandparents’ tobacco farm in the early 1990s, Chambers understood hard work and poverty early on. Extractive industries were on the way out. It was “drive, energy, and determination” that allowed her family to survive.
Chambers’ mother, Wilma, was the first member of her family to graduate from high school—and, with the encouragement and help from her older sister, Ruth, she received a degree from Berea College.
Chambers herself left the mountains to become a high school student at the United World College, graduated from Yale College, the London School of Economics, and Harvard Law School. It wasn’t without difficulty and sadness that she left the mountains behind—and she had much to learn about the ways of the larger world and the entitlement of wealth.
Then, “after years of wandering the world, [she] knew it was time to go home.” Chambers left Boston and drove back to Kentucky to work as a lawyer representing domestic violence victims. The stories she shares of her clients—mired in unemployment and the opioid crisis—will break your heart…and then make you cheer.
Through it all, Chambers tells an honest story based in love of home and its people. Chambers doesn’t wear rose-colored glasses—and she doesn’t blame. New ways are needed going forward, she knows….and it’s clear she will be part of the change.
The story above appears in our November / December 2020 issue.
