Vance seems okay with "a little pushing" in marriage".

Vance portrays his grandparents as equally at fault for their volatile relationship (“Mamaw,” he writes, “devoted herself to making his drunken life a living hell.”) The scenarios he describes, though, don’t sound to me like an ornery woman giving as good as she got. They sound more like a desperate woman trying to stop the violence perpetuated by her alcoholic spouse, by whatever means she can think of. Are her strategies good ones? Absolutely not. A better strategy might have been for her to leave the man, but Vance seems to think that would have been wrong. “They never got divorced,” he approvingly told the high school audience in 2021. “They were together to the end, till death do us part.”

His grandparents aren’t the only example of domestic violence in “Hillbilly Elegy.” Vance writes that his sister, Lindsay, describes seeing their biological father “push Mom aggressively.” But, he says, his father denied physical abuse. “I suspect that they were physically abusive to each other the way that Mom and most of her men were,” Vance eventually adjudicates: “a bit of pushing, some plate-throwing, but nothing more.”


In addition to the eyebrow-raising assertion that “a bit of pushing” is no big deal, I’ll note something else: As with Mamaw and Papaw, Vance seems to view his parents’ alleged domestic violence as a both-sides problem. So what if Lindsay says she saw their dad push their mom? he seems to be asking. Their mom probably pushed him, too. That’s not true assault, that’s just … passion? Messiness? Hillbilly-ing?

However he would define it, Vance seems to differentiate between this familial behavior — you come home drunk, I light you on fire — and what he views as more serious infractions. He writes that his aunt Lori ended up in an “abusive marriage,” and rather than suggest she should have stayed in it, he praises Mamaw and Papaw for helping her escape.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/power/2024/07/25/jd-vance-marriage-abuse-comment/