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A lot of people feel like the American Dream is further and further away, that if you work hard and play by the rules, it's a little bit harder to get ahead. It's a little bit harder to support a family, a little bit harder to buy a home. What I grew up in was one where I think for the first time really in American history, my parents' generation did not expect their children to necessarily have a better life than they did. And you saw that in all kinds of different ways, but there was this since growing up in Middletown in the 1990s, that a lot of people didn't expect the future to be better than the past. And that's a really unique and a really tragic thing. The job started to disappear from that community, drugs started to move in, hopelessness started to move in. And so a lot of people who really knew that the future would be better than the past actually found a world that was a lot more difficult and a lot more challenging. I wrote Hillbilly Elegy because I wanted to give people a sense of what it was like to live in a community like mine. I didn't think a whole lot of stories were told about white working class Americans. I didn't think a lot of stories were told about people who were struggling with some of the problems we were struggling with, joblessness, drug addiction, and so forth. And I thought that I could tell a story that would make people understand my family a little bit better and maybe in the process understand the struggles of a lot of families. I come from the places that I want to represent. And what we need is to stop sending people that are of the DC swamp. We need to send people who are of the places they aim to represent. I want to fight for the people that I come from. I want to fight for the people that I am. I want to fight for the people that I am.

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