Whether in the form of books, magazine articles or podcasts, narrative nonfiction can be a treacherous undertaking. In my days as an editor of long stories, this was something I tried to be vigilant about: in pursuit of telling a propulsive tale, was the writer downplaying or even ignoring inconvenient facts that might complicate or even contradict the narrative? Was the story constructed to deliver a message that was a little too pat, too simple, to comport with the messiness of reality? 

J.D. Vance, who I think is a very fine writer, had a message he wanted to deliver in “Hillbilly Elegy”, his memoir of growing up in a midwestern, working-class “culture in crisis”, beset by addiction, alcoholism and poverty. “These problems were not created by governments or corporations or anyone else,” he wrote in his conclusion, speaking for his fellow “hillbillies”. “We created them, and only we can fix them.” He added, “I don’t know what the answer is, precisely, but I know it starts when we stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better.”

Once he became a politician, elected to the Senate from Ohio two years ago and now running as the Republican candidate for vice-president, Mr Vance came up with the answer. It turned out to start with blaming leaders such as Barack Obama and George W. Bush. “Look, the story of basically the last 30 years, in my view, is that our leadership has turned the American people into paupers in their own country, right?” he said on Saturday night in an appearance in Hershey, Pennsylvania, with Tucker Carlson (another fine writer, by the way). “I just think that the leadership of this country has gotten so deranged that they convince themselves that there’s a great American majority for fighting a ton of wars, importing a ton of illegal aliens and shipping all the jobs overseas.”

You may not be surprised to learn that Mr Vance has a story to explain away the different messages of his two stories. He recalled first becoming friends with Mr Carlson when they both attended “some, like, massive bankers’ conference” right after he had written his memoir. “What I had done in ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ was write a very personal story,” he said. “But what I realised at that conference and others like it, is that a lot of our leaders like the book not because they sort of sympathise with the story, but because it gave them an opportunity. They pick one paragraph out and say, ‘Oh, well, this thing shows that these middle-American, you know, working-class people are bad or they’re racist, or they’re not worth focusing our attention on. We shouldn’t save their job.’”

I suspect there are elements of truth in all these stories—in what he wrote then and what he says now, even in how he says some readers interpreted his book. Taken on its own, though, each story rings as oversimplified and even ungenerous. But part of the story of Mr Vance, as I write in Lexington this week, is that he is disciplined, if not ruthless, in telling stories in ways that serve his interests. In his memoir, Mr Vance writes about how when he was a toddler his mother and sister spent a day searching stores for a popular doll for him for Christmas, before finally overpaying a stranger who had an extra. It might sound like a story about a mother’s and a sister’s self-sacrificing love for a cherished boy; Mr Vance tells it as a story about how hillbillies waste more money than they have on holidays.

Speaking of getting things wrong: in the edition of this newsletter after the Democratic National Convention, I noted how Joe Biden went unmentioned through long stretches of the proceedings. I then observed that Pete Buttigieg was introduced as the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, rather than as Mr Biden’s secretary of transport, his present role. But as several of you pointed out, more kindly than I deserved, using his current title could violate the Hatch Act, which limits politicking by government employees. I’m sorry for the mistake. (I stand by the larger narrative about the convention).

If you have any thoughts on this newsletter, or examples of other politicians who have wielded the pen to their advantage, send me an email at jbennet@economist.com. 

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