Page 79 I remember sitting in that busy courtroom, with half a dozen other families all around, and thinking they looked just like us. The moms and dads and grandparents didn’t wear suits like the lawyers and judge. They wore sweatpants and stretchy pants and T-shirts. Their hair was a bit frizzy. And it was the first time I noticed “TV accents”—the neutral accent that so many news anchors had. The social workers and the judge and the lawyer all had TV accents. None of us did. The people who ran the courthouse were different from us. The people subjected to it were not.
Page 104 In other words, Papaw wasn’t ideal company for a beautiful seventeen-year-old girl with an active social life. Thus, she took advantage of him in the same way that every young girl takes advantage of a father: She loved and admired him, she asked him for things that he sometimes gave her, and she didn’t pay him a lot of attention when she was around her friends.
Page 104 We were conditioned to feel that we couldn’t really depend on people—that, even as children, asking someone for a meal or for help with a broken-down automobile was a luxury that we shouldn’t indulge in too much lest we fully tap the reservoir of goodwill serving as a safety valve in our lives.
Page 196 For the first time in my life, I felt like an outsider in Middletown. And what turned me into an alien was my optimism.
Page 206 Though we sing the praises of social mobility, it has its downsides. The term necessarily implies a sort of movement—to a theoretically better life, yes, but also away from something. And you can’t always control the parts of your old life from which you drift.
Four stars, love me a good memoir, first 70% coherent, poignant, frank, last 30% when weaving in his diagnoses became a bit muddled the central thesis he was trying to convey. An honest look into a side of life that coastal liberals could understand a bit better in order to establish a more meaningful dialogue and slate of truly beneficial government aid - training programs, safety nets, incentives to become better, to show up, to hold yourself and not your government accountable.
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