"There was one really good thing about 'Hillbilly Elegy,' meaning the response to it: People were actually genuinely trying to understand something about a part of the country they didn’t understand."

"But there was something that wasn’t so good, which is that people were looking for some interpretive lens for Trump’s voters that never really asked them to challenge their priors or to rethink what they felt about those people. And I realized that I was being used as this whisperer of a phenomenon that some people really did want to understand, but some people didn’t. And the more that I felt like, not an explainer and a defender, but part of what I thought was wrong about the liberal establishment, the more that I felt this need to go very strongly away from it...."

Said J.D. Vance in an interview with Ross Douthat, "What J.D. Vance Believes" (NYT). This is a long interview, and that is a free-access link.

ADDED: This interview made me want to go back and read the reviews of "Hillbilly Elegy," which became a best-seller in the summer of 2016, before the shock of Donald Trump actually winning the election. I bought the book then myself, and I had the sense that it was written for liberals... who were pretty much exactly like what Vance describes in his new interview. 

From the NYT review by Jennifer Senior, August 10, 2016:

This is a historically peculiar election cycle, boisterously disrupted by outsiders, one of whom found the perfect host body in the Republican Party and became its presidential nominee.

The writer blithely portrays Donald Trump as a disease. 

An investigation of voter estrangement has never felt more urgent, and we’re certainly not getting one from the lacquered chatterers on the boob tube.

Now, along comes Mr. Vance, offering a compassionate, discerning sociological analysis of the white underclass that has helped drive the politics of rebellion, particularly the ascent of Donald J. Trump. Combining thoughtful inquiry with firsthand experience, Mr. Vance has inadvertently provided a civilized reference guide for an uncivilized election, and he’s done so in a vocabulary intelligible to both Democrats and Republicans....

See? There was a neat little place prepared for J.D. Vance. 

In a town where many children don’t finish high school, [Mamaw] raised a grandson who managed to graduate from Ohio State University and Yale Law School, defying skyscraping odds.... How much should he hold his hillbilly kin responsible for their own misfortunes.

In Mr. Vance’s estimation, the answer is: a lot. Economic insecurity, he’s convinced, accounts for only a small part of his community’s problems; the much larger issue is hillbilly culture itself. Though proud of it in many ways, he’s also convinced that it “increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it.”

His frustration with the nonworking white poor is especially acute.... Time and again, Mr. Vance preaches a message of tough love and personal responsibility.... It’s always treacherous business to blame a group for its own misfortunes. Certainly, an outsider cannot say what Mr. Vance is saying to his kin and kind. But he can — just as President Obama can say to fellow African-Americans, “brothers should pull up their pants,” as he did on MTV.

The difference is that President Obama believes poverty, though it may have a cultural component, is largely a structural problem, one the government can play a large role in fixing. Mr. Vance, a conservative, takes a far dimmer view....