Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.
Emilee Hackney is a writer from Tazewell, Virginia. Her book, All That’s Unseen: An Appalachian Memoir, was released in July. In it, she writes about her childhood in southwest Virginia, her descent into fundamentalist Christianity, and the perspective she gained on those experiences when she left home.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The Daily Yonder: I want to start where the memoir leaves off. What are you up to now?
Emily Hacknee: I love that because that’s usually the last question I get. So that’s fun. I am living in the Charlottesville, Virginia area. I actually work in the University of Virginia English department, but I’m on the administrative side. I’m married and I have a six-month-old. I hiked the Appalachian Trail in 2022, which was immediately after my dad passed away. I just went on this long, long hike and that’s where I met my husband and now we have a baby. So that’s where all my free time goes.
DY: That’s lovely. That’s crazy timing, having a six-month-old and a brand new book out that’s getting a lot of attention. How does that feel?
EH: Well, the baby, she was a surprise. I was gonna wait until after the book came out, because I thought “That’ll be a lot to be a mom and have a book coming out.” And I was not wrong about that. But she came exactly when she was supposed to. And it’s been a lot of fun. She was at my book launch event the other night and lately she’s been really fussy because she’s been teething, but she slept through the whole thing, which was great.
DY: What a blessing! Ok, for readers, can you just share the basic premise of your memoir, and maybe what motivated you to write it?
EH: Yeah, it’s about my life growing up in the Appalachian coalfields, growing up in a Pentecostal church and falling very deeply into religion. It’s about entering into a pretty unhealthy relationship when I was a very young teenager with an older guy, planning to get married and become a pastor’s wife and just live this life of motherhood and subservience.
And when our relationship fell apart in a really dramatic way, I ended up applying to Harvard, unexpectedly getting in, and experiencing extreme culture shock. I was coming from the coalfields to Harvard, which you know is just its own culture and world that’s really hard to describe to somebody that’s not been part of it. And to me especially it was a really big transition. So a lot of the book grapples with my feeling of “unbelonging” at Harvard, but also once I returned home, my feeling of unbelonging there since I left. So there are a lot of questions about identity and themes of home and what it means to belong in a place.
DY: Can you talk a little bit about your motivations for sharing those experiences with the world? What made you want to write about it in this way?
EH: When I went to Harvard, because of that culture shock, I just kinda withdrew from everybody and everything. I was just really lonely on campus. I didn’t speak in class. I didn’t really have any friends. I just isolated myself, basically, because I was always getting stereotyped based on my accent and where I’m from. And then I took a class in narrative writing with Michael Pollan in my junior year. He was really interested in my background and my stories and encouraged me to write about my experiences growing up in Appalachia and growing up in the church I did. He was really encouraging of my stories and not in the pitying way that I often experienced when I told people. He was such a curious teacher and his encouragement led me to writing about all my experiences. Those essays ended up becoming my senior thesis, and from there Michael encouraged me to think about turning them into a book. He connected me with his agent and she saw something in it she really liked too. And I got a lot of advice from her.
But I wasn’t just writing it because other people were saying, “You should write this.” I wrote it because I was so frustrated with how the outside world sees Appalachia, just by its stereotypes. And that’s all that I felt like I was seen for. So I just wanted to write about my experience there, even though it’s kind of an unusual one, in the church that I grew up in. I felt like there needed to be a narrative out there of what it’s like to come from real Appalachia.
DY: It was interesting to me because so many of the entries to this genre, this kind of memoir, have an incipient trauma that the rest of the book follows. And obviously your experiences in the church and with your former fiancé were really crazy and traumatic in many ways, but it was interesting to me that your childhood itself, in a lot of ways, seemed pretty normal. Not that the way that you wrote about it was banal or anything like that, but there was a sort of banality to the childhood chapters. It was a display of normalcy in some ways. Does that resonate with you at all?
EH: No, it totally does. Things start to fly off the rails once I become a teenager and get really involved in this church and this relationship. But I’ve heard that from other people, that it’s kind of interesting in the way that things sort of go backwards from the typical structure.
DY: Just to go back to something that you said about trying to push back against outsider perspectives on Appalachia, can you try to characterize what it is that you were writing against or felt compelled to write against when you were in college?
EH: I transferred to Harvard in 2017 and this was right on the heels of the 2016 election and Hillbilly Elegy and I feel like that probably played a large part into why I was always getting stereotyped by people. Like I had somebody ask me if I’d ever shot a gun. I had somebody else ask me if I voted for Trump. Just these really invasive questions, solely based on stereotypes from the media about Appalachia. Especially at that time a lot of Appalachia voted very red. And then Hillbilly Elegy was perpetuating these stereotypes about Appalachia that have been around for decades, about poverty and addiction and domestic abuse. That book was in my head as I was writing mine because it was, unfortunately, the big Appalachian narrative. So I didn’t want to do what JD Vance did in his book, like talk about Appalachian culture as a whole. I wanted to talk about my experiences in Appalachia, my personal experiences. But through that hoping that people would see that there’s a lot of nuance to the origins of these stereotypes, even if some of them do ring true. You know, there’s poverty in my book and there’s addiction and domestic violence. All the themes that are present in Vance’s book are present in mine. But I wanted to give a different picture of what it could look like and not say this is the norm, necessarily.
DY: To dig into your individual life experience a little bit more, can you describe a little bit what the kind of Pentecostalism that you grew up in looked like?
EH: I guess I should start with the pastor because he lived in a different state and he visited my part of Appalachia, southwest Virginia, in the late nineties or early two thousands. He said that he saw a lot of hopelessness, and I guess the opioid crisis was starting to have an effect. So he relocated his family there and built a church. And it was a different kind of church from everything that was around there at the time. It labeled itself non-denominational. It had this veneer of contemporariness and modernity that most churches didn’t have. We had Christian rock music and the pastor was wearing t-shirts and there were young families. It was something new and different that people hadn’t experienced before, including my mom, which is why she was drawn to it.
There was freedom to worship however you wanted. It was loud, rambunctious, charismatic. And it became pretty popular in my community. It grew to have two services, and there were hundreds of people that went there, which is pretty significant for where I grew up because it’s a town of a few thousand people. But I say it was a veneer of contemporariness because underneath it there were a lot of fundamental ideas.
And I should say that the pastor himself was not as radical as a lot of the members of the church. When I started to get more deeply into religion with the man who became my fiancé, we became involved in this group of people that had some really radical ideas, like really extreme ideas about men being superior to women and what a woman’s place is.
DY: I wanted to ask about what it was like to reflect on that time in your life really closely as you must have had to to write this book, and also whether you miss any parts of that time of your life. What do you think fundamentally that that really intensive churchgoing was giving to you?
EH: I felt this very, very strong sense of community and friendship and kinship with these people that I was going to church with four or five times a week. I felt so close to them. We would go to each other’s houses and spend time together, go out to eat together. It was a very close circle of friends. But also, and I talk about this in my book, as soon as I left the church we never spoke again. So how sincere were those relationships? It was basically built on what we collectively believed and so reflecting on it makes me a little bit sad, I guess, because it seems like there was not a lot like holding our friendship together. But yeah, that community I really miss.
At Harvard in 2017, on the heels of the 2016 election and “Hillbilly Elegy,” Hackney encountered questions from peers that were based in stereotypes. (Photo provided by Emilee Hackney)
I also really miss the feeling of having something special, having a special connection to God. It’s something that’s hard to explain, that feeling of being so supernaturally in tune with the divine. That feeling is unlike anything I can describe or anything I’ve ever experienced since.
DY: Yeah, I mean, I can imagine doing a lot of things that I otherwise wouldn’t if I was experiencing a supernatural connection with the divine.
It’s interesting to hear you talk about the friendships that you had within the church, and I think it sort of helps me make sense of my experience of reading the book, because one thing I really noticed while I was reading is that we don’t get much close description of your friends from that time period. The characters that stand out are the pastor and your boyfriend at the time and and your parents. But it’s almost like the other people that you were surrounded by don’t seem to stand out in any clear way at a lot of different points.
EH: A lot of it is just that the book started to go so long that unnecessary stuff got cut, but also I guess where those friendships were not very long lasting, it didn’t feel as important for me to describe them.
DY: It makes sense, especially given that that’s your read on it now.
I also got the sense the break from that form of Christianity was much sharper than your break from the kinds of conservative politics you grew up in. You seem to lose all sympathy for that kind of proselytizing Christianity very quickly. You have an anecdote about being at college and being invited to a Christian students group and being so horrified by it that you throw your plate of food away and leave. But one thing that you described holding onto pretty deep into college is a complicated sympathy for pro-Trump politics, and then much later on you have a change of heart about that. But I was wondering if you could reflect on or compare those two breaks in your thinking.
EH: I think the break with the church was so immediate because it was just such a shock to see the excuses that were made for my fiancé preying on a child in that church. It was such a horrifying thing that the disillusionment was instantaneous. I didn’t feel like there was any way I could make excuses. For the politics, it felt more like a hazy middle ground that was not as stark. Most people I knew were Trump voters at the time. Quite a few have reversed at this point, but back then it seemed like most people I knew were still fairly conservative and I guess, you know, it’s kind of sad, but a lot of times we change our opinions when we’re personally affected by something. And to me that didn’t happen until I was writing my essay in an undergraduate investigative journalism class about what Trump had done for coal country.
I had in my head that he was helping my home region. I saw coal making a little bit of a comeback when he was elected. And Trump had promised to do that, so I just assumed that it was his doing. And, you know, come to find out that it wasn’t. It just took longer for me to see the truth of what was really happening. In my church, I saw that truth immediately. On the political change, it just took longer and it took more digging and more thought.
And I will say too, there’s another aspect of it that’s interesting. When I went up to Harvard, Cambridge was so liberal, right? And I come from this very conservative place. I was getting stereotyped by all these professors and other people. So I had a little bit of a chip on my shoulder. I was like, “All these liberals, they just think they know everything. They think they’re better than me.” It just made me feel very spiteful. So I felt like I had to cling onto that conservative identity in a way because I just felt so looked down upon because of my background. I wasn’t even that conservative, but I was like, “I’m way more conservative than all these liberals that think they’re better than me.”
DY: It reminds me of the part of the book which I loved and really related to where you go home for one of the summers of college and you’re like, “I was shooting guns and drinking beers and I never did that before but all of a sudden it felt like part of my identity.”
EH: Yeah, like, “I have to do this because the liberals think this is all we are, so maybe that’s what I’ll be.”
DY: I’ve talked about this before, but I did the same thing with country music. I loved country music as a kid, but I kinda rejected it as a teenager and then as soon as I went away to college I got so into it and sort of performatively made it part of my identity. And I stand by my tastes but it was funny that being in a sterile liberal city made me want to listen to the country music of my childhood again for the first time in years.
EH: I lived next to one of the final clubs one year and every single weekend they would play “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” I was like, “How bizarre to hear this song about West Virginia in Cambridge?” It made me homesick, but it was also a really strange feeling.
DY: You’re very fresh off of the book’s release right now. Has there been anything surprising to you about the reception, or what’s the release experience been like for you?
EH: Well the morning of the launch party my publicist asked me how many people I thought would come. I was like, “I think 25, hopefully more.” And there were 80 people. They sold out of books. It was absolutely insane. I was not expecting that kind of reception at all. And a good chunk of them were people I didn’t even know. People seem to be genuinely interested in what an Appalachian experience is like, and not in like the way that people were in 2016. It seems more curious and more genuine. And I’ve gotten tons of messages from people from my hometown or people that grew up around Tazewell or southwest Virginia and I’ve been getting a lot of positive feedback. People are like, “Thanks for putting Tazewell on the map and talking about us.”
This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox.
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