She Can't Help Herself

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Cassie Chambers: Fempowered lawyer activist who is running for political office. Did her family raise her right if she is the result?

Judge the SSH of her husband for yourself in the main photo for her website.

.@gracyolmstead reviews a new book on rural Appalachian Americans, this time with a focus on women who "bind their families together, protect their kith and kin, and spur each other on to success." https://t.co/S8O7HoTGC6

— The American Conservative (@amconmag) June 8, 2020

Unfortunately, the middle section of Hill Women is less entrancing. Here, the book diverges from its early promise—to tell the stories of forgotten or ignored hill women—to focus instead on Chambers’s own life: her journey from Berea, to boarding school, to an Ivy League college. Hill Women wants to be both a personal memoir and a story about a place. In some ways, the two obviously overlap: Chambers grew up in Appalachia and is one of its hill women. But the introduction and title suggest that it means to tell the story of multiple hill women, and so the singular focus at the midway point is disappointing. 

This is not to suggest that Chambers’s story isn’t fascinating and important. It is. But tales of her days at boarding school, her college boyfriend, and struggles with the meritocracy and class divides of Yale take up too many pages for a book that is supposed to be about Appalachia, about tales that “have ricocheted within the mountains, growing more faint with time,” as Chambers puts it in her introduction. It could be that she ran out of stories, but those she does tell are so tantalizing, I left the book hungry for more. We’ve read memoirs about kids who left Appalachia for the big city and for Ivy League universities. I was eager to read more about the Aunt Ruths and Wilmas.

The ending of the book twists into politics—something it dabbles in throughout, but rarely focuses on. This makes sense, since Chambers is running for office, a member of the Democratic Party, and a staunch opponent of Trump. Her work to reform the legal system on behalf of her clients is interesting, but it again made the book feel a bit imbalanced. The early parts of Hill Women are far more focused on anecdotal history and stories of community resilience than on politics and policy. There’s much that could be written about the forms of sharecropping that Chambers’s family experienced, as well as the impact of coal mining and rural policy on communities like Booneville. But balancing the personal and political, anecdotal and philosophical, is no easy task.