Changing Pennsylvania

On Appalachia, hillbillies, & Amish Paradise

Good morning, friends.

Three former neighborhood scenes (ft. Buddy the dog)

I regret to inform you that I’ve been reading the news. This has had the effect on my mental health that you’d expect.

I also recently finished Housemates, a novel by Emma Copley Eisenberg. The book had been on my radar for a while, partly because I had read Eisenberg’s 2020 debut The Third Rainbow Girl, a nonfiction hybrid memoir about rural West Virginia; but mainly because I hear “road trip across Central PA” in a synopsis and my ears perk up. It’s not a place you see in literary fiction¹ much, for whatever reason, and I was very curious to see how it’d be portrayed.

Housemates is about two friends and new housemates Bernie and Leah, a photographer and writer respectively, who are a sort of modern imagining of artists Berenice Abbott and Elizabeth McCausland. In the novel, Bernie grew up working class in rural PA, while Leah (like Eisenberg) is from Manhattan and now living in Philly, from a family who she doesn’t call wealthy but who seem to have paid for a Swarthmore education. Bernie’s photography professor and former mentor has died after being fired/cancelled for sexual harassment of students, and for opaque reasons has left his estate to Bernie that primarily consists of a shed full of art in the middle of Pennsylvania (Mifflin co). Leah has some grant cash and offers to go with Bernie to deal with the collection, turning the errand into a larger road trip/collaborative creative project. The story touches on a few pit stops across Pennsylvania, including the professor’s house, before returning to Philadelphia. It’s set in the Trump presidency and despite a weird relationship with proper names is extremely of-the-moment, by turns poking fun at gentrifying progressives and being super earnest.

Bluntly, the novel didn’t work for me; it wasn’t a good fit stylistically or conceptually, but not in any particularly bad or interesting way, just not to my taste & less effective than I think it could have been. What stuck with me after I returned it to the library, however, was the time spent in rural PA, and how it was described.

There was enough hand-wringing about the “economically anxious rural white voter” in 2016 and since to propel Vance to where he is today, a hand-wringing and capitulating that really just boils down to mundane racism and class anxiety. That is, of course, what it all really is under the surface: rural people are exactly the same as any other people with all of humanity’s virtues and failings.

Lancaster County, my hometown, is the first stop on this cross-state trip. Headed west on the Lincoln Highway, they begin to see horses and buggies on the road. Leah tries to take a picture, though the Amish woman in the buggy turns away. Bernie (who “had lots of Amish kids” in her town²) explains to her the Amish’s opposition to photography, their interpretation of no ‘graven images.’ (Bernie doesn’t say this, but it’s also just really weird to intentionally take a photo of a stranger without asking, imo, but it does happen a lot.) Leah and Bernie stop to pick up an Amish hitchhiker on his way to ‘The Smorgasbord³.’ He’s thirteen years old and nameless, “the boy,” and after climbing in the backseat starts asking them immediately about the camera, if they’re in Lancaster to make a movie. “We get a lot of people coming through to make movies about us,” he says, and more or less unprompted starts chatting about a man in his church who was shunned for telling someone with a camera about “secrets people were keeping, like what the bishops were getting up to with the unmarried girls in early morning Bible study.⁴

This is, at least as is included in the text, the seventh sentence he’s spoken to two adult strangers, and it startled me out of the book. I’ve met one or two Amish kids willing to talk this much to an English⁵ adult, though rarely, and all of them have been younger children and kids who I’ve seen more than once, whose parents own a feed store or greenhouse where the whole family works. It’s also very possible that in 2018, when a good majority of Amish teens have cell phones, that more of them would be comfortable chatting with strangers like this than they were a decade ago. What stops me is the quick and frank way he describes a member of his community being shunned and gives a specific example of a kind of abuse in the Amish community, an odd thing for any teenager of any community to offer to a stranger, I think. While I can appreciate Eisenberg avoiding the common trope of painting the Amish as chaste innocents from a simpler time and while I acknowledge that I haven’t met every Amish teenager and am far from an expert, cramming short bursts of candor on extremely weighty and traumatic church trauma into a car ride with no context is a bizarre choice. In the next two pages, he makes an offhand remark about his sister “having another kid, even though she doesn’t want to,” before finally summing up with:

There’s like three worlds, he said at last. The one that’s in the books about us, that makes people want to make movies about us. That’s the one my grandparents live in. Then there’s the one that is our actual lives now, where me and my sister and her husband and my parents live. And then there is the one that is out there where you all live.

This, of course, seems to be part of Eisenberg’s thesis: Bernie and Leah (particularly Leah, as the non-native) have gone on an excursion to Oz, a foreign world separate somehow from the one they came from (even though it’s an hour down the highway and there are Amish in Philly, for that matter). All of these are really interesting and fair points about the Amish, but I can’t emphasize enough that this is a single conversation in which an Amish child does most of the talking that lasts about three pages before we never mention it again, a sort of cultural whiplash that feints at how the Amish are extremely patriarchal but somehow in a different world than the rest of us. Sounds a lot like the regular world to me, tbh.

After this we flash back to Bernie’s time learning photography with Daniel Dunn, and then to Leah’s childhood in Manhattan. When we return to the road trip they mention having sandwiches “in Lancaster” and a sign advertising fire station chicken and waffles (yes, good) but that they had left the Susquehanna far behind. I flipped back, assuming I had missed something, but that was it. The Amish are about six percent of the population in Lancaster.

This pattern will continue through the novel as Bernie and Leah make further stops on their road trip. The next section is more interesting because something actually happens, the encounter with Dunn’s work and its impact on Bernie and the question of what to do with art from the poisoned tree, but a dozen pages later the books falls into a more typical road trip pattern. Drive, scene, sleep, repeat. In Dillsburg, Bernie mentions her brother’s addiction to opiates and reminisces (not especially fondly) about partying in the woods. When Leah asks why Bernie isn’t taking more pictures, Bernie resists:

It would show just one thing, Bernie said. One side, like, oh look how messed up these people are, or oh how sad… With words, you can go wider… I don’t want my pictures to stand in for any bigger idea, like drug addiction or poor country people. I just want them to be what they are.

But you’ll have my words too, Leah said. To go with whatever you make. It won’t be your image alone.⁶

Maybe I’m asking too much of Leah, a fictional character, but I bristle at both ideas equally; that that baggage must automatically come with a photograph of a Waffle House parking lot, but also that Leah’s words— those of a visitor, someone who is spending a few hours at most in each stop— will ‘fix’ this, will somehow correct the larger perception, despite Leah (whether the character or the author I’m unsure) not really having anything interesting to say. Curling around back roads, Leah observes Confederate flags hung at houses next-door to ones with Tibetan peace flags and wonders, “What was this place, Pennsylvania, that had two hearts?”⁷ I don’t know what that means. Later, the two will see two men in confederate flag shirts watching a group of Black women musicians and Leah starts filming them “just in case,”⁸ which I will again suggest is extremely weird, particularly weeks/months into this trip. A character’s behavior is never automatically endorsed by the author, even if they share autobiographical details, but I get the sense that this is supposed to be a thoughtful quality of Leah’s, something admirable— she’s the perceptive one, the one that sees what’s really going on.

Eventually they reach Hagerstown (which Bernie acknowledges is “technically” in Maryland) and inside the town’s gay bar marvel that it’s like going “twenty years back in time.”⁹ A raffle leads them to ‘the caverns,’¹⁰ where Bernie and Leah sort-of crash a cool, non-traditional wedding. In the vows, the groom remarks,

But weirdly, we have a lot in common… Being from this strange shit county. Pennsyltucky. But we’re both proud…
But, he continued, all jokes aside, no one gets all this more than you do. This place that people are always fighting about and fighting over what it means. ¹¹

His speech ends. Remarkable restraint, to wait until page 254 to use the term Pennsyltucky, a term I’ve never personally heard a rural PA person say except in agreement with someone else. An odd choice for wedding vows. The second line, I at least have to admit, is in fairness what I’m doing now: Fighting about and fighting over what it means, even if my argument is that it doesn’t mean anything different than any other place. Again, it feels like we’re looking at a group of zoo animals, not least because this scene is set with Bernie and Leah looking down on the wedding from a balcony.

After this, the ‘road trip’ section of the novel is functionally over, though there is a more montage-like section at the end that is centered less around rural spectacle and more about Bernie and Leah’s relationship. We flash forward a bit to the reaction to Bernie and Leah’s art project, which apparently spawned “viral” posts and agent representation. Similar to the reaction to J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy in 2016, this art project apparently comes on the heels of the 2020 election and hits the zeitgeist at exactly the right moment, speaking to a nation’s surprising interest in Pennsylvania and a pandemic turn to the analog/tangible/collective. Eisenberg presents a mix of critical responses, some that celebrate Bernie’s rural roots while other’s insist the real genius is the queerness Leah brings to the text element, preventing Bernie’s photos from remaining “pretty pastoral images.¹²” They call it Changing Pennsylvania, because that’s what Leah put on the form when she asked for grant money at the beginning of the summer, an analog for Bernice Abbot’s Changing New York, though I don’t really understand how it translates. Other than a small paragraph from Leah, commenting on one of Daniel Dunn’s photographs (a 9/11 Stewartstown shot that made his name) and how it makes her question Americanness/her Americanness, the bulk of the project is left to our imagination.

I am extremely ready to consider that I’m being unfair to Housemates; I went in with trepidation about the portrayal of Central PA and that prejudice probably colored my reading. Several people whose taste in books I respect, including a bookseller in Lancaster, liked and recommend the book. (If you’ve read it too I hope you will talk to me about it! I promise I am open-minded!) (I would also be curious to know more about the West Virginian response to The Third Rainbow Girl, a perspective I didn’t really find in reviews but which in my memory has a similar perspective.) I resisted writing about Housemates, returning it to the library before checking it out and returning it for the second time, because it isn’t a harmful book. It’s fine. It’s not Breaking Amish or the Beverly Hillbillies or even Hillbilly Elegy, not by a long shot. But it’s been on my mind, and now with America’s latest favorite hillbilly-turned-Hitler-apologist in the headlines I find I can’t shake it.

Where I’m from is not Appalachia by any means (neither is Middletown Ohio, of course), but it is fairly rural. I say fairly, hesitant to fully commit to the rural title, reluctant to lump my stable fringe-suburban upbringing in with the next degree up, the actual Appalachians and other areas of decentralized poverty, but the truth of the matter is that I grew up in the country and among people who thought of themselves as country people, thirty minutes outside a city just a little too big to be called a town, big enough to be a stop on the presidential campaign trail when something is needed to fill time between Pittsburgh and Philly. Like anyone, I could detail the quirks and oddities and tragedies of my hometown and the people in it, how the near entirety of my family is there right now. I could tell you more about the Amish, or about the kids in my neighborhood that died of overdoses, or of rich Christian private school kids I went to church with, or the county’s widely recognized refugee resettlement programs, or its love of Christian nationalism. It’s complex, and it’s also changed quite a lot since my childhood. There’s a lot that’s very generic and a lot that couldn’t be condensed into a newsletter, even if I wanted to try. All of that is to say that I find J.D. Vance’s “hillbilly” narrative very stupid, and very boring. In convincing America that he was finally giving them the “real story” of rural (white) America and being the first (loudest, whitest malest) to point the finger at the inadequacies he saw in the people around him, he simply managed to trade one story for another, one that showcases himself as exceptional not because of the circumstances of overcame but because he was the only one smart enough to understand they must be and could be overcome.

There was enough hand-wringing about the “economically anxious rural white voter” in 2016 and since to propel Vance to where he is today, hand-wringing and capitulating that really just boils down to mundane racism and class anxiety. That is, of course, what it all really is under the surface: rural people are exactly the same as any other people with all of humanity’s virtues and failings. Their surroundings and privileges or lack thereof and values and so on filter and color how those motivations and fears and wishes manifest and change, but the human instinct behind a Bryn Mawr mom desperate to get her baby on the right private school waitlist and a Quarryville mom trading up for a bigger SUV are fundamentally the same. If it sounds like I’m writing apologia for those who do speak and vote with close-minded, selfish, racist beliefs, please trust that I’m not; I’m just exhausted of myth-making and excuse-writing. Treating rural folk like zoo animals that have learned to stand on their hind legs is as disgusting and useless as the Vance narrative that proclaims the rural poor got that way because they’re just exceptionally lazy and have gotten what they deserve; one can suggest that rural or impoverished people are more or less lazy than any other group but since ‘laziness’ isn’t quantifiable, doesn’t it make more sense to assume that it isn’t a factor and probably occurs approximately as often in rural people as it does in the general population? The glorification or denigration or exotification of rural folks communicates very little about actual rural people and says much more about the person writing the op-ed (or 300-page book).

I don’t feel qualified to speak further about Vance and his book, partly because I haven’t read it¹³ and partly, again, because I’m not Appalachian (or a political writer). There are five hundred very good reasons that Vance should not be anywhere near political office that have nothing to do with his upbringing, his book, or his beard. What I can and do object to is a portrayal of rural people and rural Pennsylvania in particular that delights in othering, and in the self-aggrandizement and myth-making of people who think they’ve really done something by pretending they’ve gone through the looking glass.

Til next time,

Courtney

P.S. A housekeeping note: the biweekly pace of this newsletter has become unsustainable/less fun (hence this one being a little late) and so I’m going to do this less frequently, likely monthly. <3 Thank you for being here!

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What I’ve been reading & consuming this week:

• Large content warning for CSA: considering amount of space this newsletter has given to Alice Munro’s work I feel like I would be remiss not to link to her daughter Andrea Skinner’s article for the Toronto Sun on the child abuse Skinner suffered at the hands her stepfather, Munro’s husband, who Munro supported and remained married to through his confession and conviction. It’s a powerful, vulnerable, and thoughtful read and I admire Skinner very much for sharing her story. I don’t have a good response but would like to link to Brandon Taylor’s excellent newsletter on the subject.

• Embarrassingly expensive farmer’s market blackberries by the pint

• What Kingdom, by Fine Gråbøl. Really interesting debut novel about a young woman’s time in a Danish mental institution/halfway home, particularly because it’s a modern work that engages with Girl, Interrupted in a way that really highlights the differences between American and Danish mental health care in a way that I found fascinating and somewhat (perhaps intentionally? sometimes painfully?) innocent.

• Speaking of works in translation: in love with this piece in The New York Times by Sophie Hughes on the art of translation. So admire the work that goes into rendering not just bare meaning but the stylistic work of art from one language to another, the slippery and also intuitive ways we engage with languages (and through them, the world)!!

• Looking at zillow search results of places I don’t really want to live but that are colder than here

• I felt like I knew more than I ever wanted to know about Ballerina Farms and her family but I admit I found this profile by Megan Agnew in The Times particularly interesting in a beginning-of-the-horror-movie sort of way; I feel like there were some revealing moments here (the husband’s “not wanting a nanny” and “filling up” the van alongside the wife’s “we’re getting old” and “sometimes so exhausted she has to go to bed for a week (!!)” and only getting an epidural when her husband left the room (!!!)) that I haven’t seen in bigger, more theoretical discussions:

  I can’t, it seems, get an answer out of Neeleman without her being corrected, interrupted or answered for by either her husband or a child. Usually I am doing battle with steely Hollywood publicists; today I am up against an army of toddlers who all want their mum and a husband who thinks he knows better.

  Why, I ask before I leave, did she do those pageants in between babies? “Well, my sister called me and said, There’s a Mrs Utah, let’s do it together.’ Just to —” she gestures at the children around her —“break things up.”

  And the sequined gowns? Well, they used to be in her bedroom cupboard, but with all of her stuff — and Daniel’s and Henry’s and Charles’s and George’s and Frances’s and Lois’s and Martha’s and Mabel’s and Flora’s — the cupboard got so full that there wasn’t any more room. So Daniel put them in the garage.

• Sophie Vershbow in Esquire on celebrity book clubs.

• Feels very millennial/elderly to share a TikTok link via newsletter but this doxie TikTok did make my day.

• Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea, (in keeping with last week’s newsletter on beach reads), which is an insane book & quite good, but I have to mention that it was published in 1978 and 1) it mentions the importance of “continuous small treats” on the very first page, and 2) somewhere later in the book a character describes a house as having “bad vibes.” The timelessness of literature, folks!

• I’ve been listening to Clairo’s new album Charm after my friend Marissa wrote this lovely review for Pitchfork; it (if sound if not in lyric) is kind of where my mood’s at, this summer.

• Rewatching VEEP (laugh so you don’t cry, etc) and having fun pointing out the Baltimore locations, especially those in our neighborhood :)

• “Costco in Cancún,” by Simon Wu, on The Paris Review Blog.

• My close personal friend Manny Jacinto in The New York Times. Overall, I liked Acolyte fine, and am interested in where it goes next season.

1. In contrast, I think it’s quite popular in genre fiction, specifically romance— at least within Lancaster I think Beverly Lewis has basically founded the “amish romance” genre which is pretty popular! The only really ~literary~ examples I can think of off the top of my head are Updike’s Rabbit books, which are set around fictional Reading and James McBride’s The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, which is at least partially set in Pottstown (I didn’t finish that one).

2. Eisenberg, Emma Copley. Housemates. Harcourt, 2024. p. 141

3. Is this not Shady Maple? If so, just call it that, jfc, but if it is the geography’s all off because it’s north of Paradise, not on the way to the city, which is what someone already in Lancaster county would mean by ‘going to Lancaster.’ If not, no one calls the smaller ones ‘the smorgasbord’ and none of them have the whole feed store complex element, but ok, it’s fiction, calm down Courtney.

4. p. 142-143

5. English as in non-Amish, as the Amish use it.

6. p. 188

7. p. 197

8. p. 318

9. p. 215

10. Seemingly based on Penn Caverns, which would be a long drive/backtrack from Maryland but is a neat spot.

11. p. 254

12. p. 248

13. If Books Could Kill does a nice reading here, if you haven’t either and are curious.