The word elegy carries weight. It is not merely a decorative way to say “sad book.” An elegy mourns. It lingers with loss. It asks the writer to approach grief with humility and care.

In hooks’s hands, Appalachia is not a talking point. It is not a shorthand for cultural failure. It is not a stage on which outsiders, politicians, or upwardly mobile survivors get to explain what is wrong with poor people.

Her Appalachia is remembered, embodied, complicated. It is land and language, history and harm, beauty and grief. It is place as inheritance, wound, and belonging.

That is very different from what I took from Hillbilly Elegy.

What Hillbilly Elegy did not give me

I did not enjoy J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. More than that, I did not trust it.

I did not trust the way the book seemed to move from personal story into broad conclusions about poverty, class, and character. I did not trust how quickly structural suffering could begin to look like individual failure. I did not trust the ease with which poor people could become evidence in someone else’s argument.

Of course, a writer has the right to tell his own story.

But readers have rights, too.

Readers have the right to ask what a story does once it enters the culture. Does it deepen compassion? Does it complicate easy answers? Does it ask more of the powerful? Or does it make suffering easier to judge from a safe distance?

Personal story can illuminate. It can also be used to indict people who share the storyteller’s origins but not his outcome.

That distinction matters.

A memoir about poverty can invite readers into greater humility. It can help us see how family, addiction, policy, wages, trauma, education, geography, illness, and opportunity become tangled in a human life. It can resist the cheap comfort of blame.

Or it can allow readers to believe they have understood poverty because they have been handed a story in which escape becomes proof of virtue.

That was my trouble with Hillbilly Elegy.

It was not that Vance told his story. It was that his story seemed too easily converted into an argument about other people’s failures.

Two books called Communion

Then came the second echo.

bell hooks published Communion: The Female Search for Love in 2002. J.D. Vance now has a book titled Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith.

Again, I am not claiming proof of intent.

But I am asking a question.

What happens when a powerful political figure follows a Black feminist thinker into the same charged language?

What kind of authority does a writer borrow when he reaches for words already deepened by someone else’s moral imagination?

The word communion is not neutral. It carries religious meaning, yes, but also relational meaning. It suggests union, fellowship, shared life, spiritual intimacy, belonging, and return.

In hooks’s work, communion is not merely private comfort. It is not a sentimental glow. It is a serious inquiry into love, women’s full humanity, patriarchy, selfhood, and the possibility of connection without domination.

hooks asks what love requires from us, not only what love gives us.

That is a harder question.

In hooks’s hands, love is not an escape from power. Love is where power must be examined: who is allowed to desire, who is trained to serve, who is praised for silence, who is punished for wanting, who has been told that obedience is love, and who has been asked to disappear in order to belong.

Those are not small questions. They are the kind of questions that can change a reader.

The question of borrowed authority

This is where I keep returning: titles matter.

A title is not only a label. It is an invitation. It tells readers what room they are entering. It signals lineage, mood, seriousness, aspiration, and sometimes allegiance.

So when similar titles appear across very different bodies of work, the question is not only, “Was this intentional?”

The better question may be, “What is being carried forward?”

Maybe the echo carries moral imagination, complexity, compassion, and intellectual burden. Maybe the language has been lifted from one tradition and placed in service of another. The distinction matters because a writer can borrow the sound of seriousness without carrying the vision that gave the language its force.

That is what I mean by borrowed authority.

Borrowed authority is what happens when a person reaches for language shaped by someone else’s struggle, intellect, courage, or vision, then uses the resonance of that language to authorize a different project.

It is not always conscious, illegal, or provable. It is still worth noticing, especially when the borrower holds more public power than the thinker whose language seems to echo underneath.

The issue sharpens when language from a writer who asks us to dismantle domination appears in a project that may strengthen a public image rooted in authority, certainty, and political power.

Maybe the echo is coincidence. Maybe it is homage. Maybe it is market instinct. Maybe it is the old habit of power: taking the shimmer of someone else’s language without carrying the burden of her vision.

I am careful with the word appropriation. It can become too quick, too final, too easy. But appropriation is not always a cartoon act of theft. Sometimes it is subtler than that. Sometimes it is what happens when a culture absorbs the language of a thinker while refusing the transformation that thinker demanded.

What bell hooks helps readers see

This is why I return to bell hooks.

Not because she gives me slogans. Not because she gives me a team to join. Not because she makes the world simpler.

Because she makes the world harder to flatten.

She teaches readers to notice power where we have been told to see only private life: inside love, family, place, faith, gender, memory, and the stories we inherit before we know we are allowed to question them.

She does not let us pretend that love can be healthy while domination remains intact. She does not let us pretend that belonging is real if it requires silence, obedience, or self-erasure.

That is one of the great gifts of reading her. She gives us better questions. Not the superficial questions that stop at individual behavior — Why didn’t they make better choices? Why can’t women be more loving? Why don’t people simply leave the places that wound them? — but the deeper questions underneath: What choices were actually available? Who taught women that love meant disappearing? What does place give, take, demand, and remember?

This is the difference between language that enlarges human dignity and language that merely borrows the sound of seriousness.

Reading as discernment

I began by buying books for summer reading: Kevin Fedarko for the part of me still wild-ish enough to enter the Grand Canyon by page, bell hooks for poetry, place, Appalachia, and the search for love. But the list did not stay innocent for long. Appalachian Elegy led me back to Hillbilly Elegy. Communion led me to another Communion. What began as a reading list became a question of appropriation I could not unsee.

That is one reason reading still matters to me. Books do not only entertain or inform us. They sharpen our sense of what language is doing. A reader can learn to hear when grief is being honored and when it is being used, when love is being examined and when it is being claimed as a credential, when place is being remembered with tenderness and when place is being converted into argument.

This is not a small distinction. A culture is shaped by the stories it rewards, the voices it elevates, and the language it allows powerful people to borrow without accountability. If a title carries the echo of another writer’s moral imagination, the echo deserves attention.

So yes, my summer reading stack took a strange turn. I thought I was buying books. Instead, I found myself thinking about Appalachia, class, feminism, love, faith, and the uneasy power of borrowed language.

When powerful people borrow language shaped by deeper moral vision, what exactly are they carrying forward?

And what are they leaving behind?