>I'm also fairly certain that Vance did not wander the streets of Middletown, feral and unparented. My understanding is that he was raised by his grand-parents, not that he lived with the chaos of his mother's situation.

So an addict mother, having to be raised by grand-parents, having to go to the army and then use the GI Bill to study, growing up in an declining small working class town in Ohio, are not enough?

He had to be "feral and unparented" to qualify? Because that's what people mean when they talk about the working and middle class "white American struggles"? Vicorian street urchins?

In any case, by those elements alone, he knows 100x about "white American struggles" than the average champion of the poor at the Met Gala and the New Yorker.