Inside JD Vance's Chaotic Childhood With His Older Sister Lindsay

JD Vance is not your typical vice presidential candidate. Not only was he once Donald Trump's biggest critic, but if the Republicans win the 2024 election, Vance will also become the country's third-youngest vice president in history (and the first in decades to sport a beard). Indeed, there are plenty of weird things about Vance we can't help but notice, but stories about his turbulent childhood definitely make him more relatable, especially to working-class Americans who struggle to make ends meet.

In 2016, Vance released a memoir titled, "Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis." In the book, he spoke candidly about his and his half-sister Lindsay Vance's chaotic upbringing in Middletown, Ohio. Vance and Lindsay's mother was addicted to drugs, had violent tendencies, and divorced her husband when Vance was a little kid.

During an interview with NPR's "Fresh Air," Vance touched on some of the incidents he wrote about in the book, including the one time his mother threatened to crash the car and kill both of them. "[I] hopped in the back seat to hide from her. And this got her really angry. And she stopped the car and pulled over and, I think, was going to start hitting me. And so I ran," Vance recalled. This led to lawsuits against his mother, and eventually, Vance and Lindsay were adopted by their grandparents.

JD Vance and his sister Lindsay had one thing in common as kids: Both of them were desperate to escape their circumstances. While JD was navigating his teenage years, Lindsay left home. She went on to get married and had three kids while JD was still trying to figure out what to do with his life.

Lindsay felt guilty about leaving her little brother behind, especially once she read his memoir and was reminded of her previous life and how bad it had been. "I just laid in bed at night pulling apart and reading it and I would just cry," she told Megyn Kelly during an NBC News interview. "I just felt so sorry for those kids and why I didn't see more of him. ... I should have been able to do more." Vance has made it clear that he never blamed Lindsay for leaving. "I just don't think that Lindsay should feel guilty at all about it," he told Kelly. "She had found her way and I was looking for my way out."

Vance almost took the wrong way out. He started hanging out with the wrong kids and eventually experimented with drugs. But his grandmother found out and gave him a very stern talking-to, something he remembers fondly. "She actually told me in a very menacing voice, 'Look JD, I'll give you a choice. You can either stop hanging out with these kids, or I'll run them over with my car. And trust me, no one will ever find out,'" Vance recalled while speaking to NPR's "Fresh Air." 

One thing JD Vance remembers about his grandmother is her resolve and wise counsel. She was well aware that outsiders looked down on their poor community. In his book, "Hillbilly Elegy," Vance recalls how she used to grumble about how the rest of the country looked down on the folks in Middletown, Ohio. "We are the only group of people [other Americans] don't have to be ashamed to look down upon," Vance recalls her telling him. But she said something else that stuck with him: "Never be like these f***ing losers who think the deck is stacked against them."

Vance took his grandmother's advice to heart, and it led him to joining the U.S. Marine Corps, graduating from Ohio State University, and eventually, Yale Law School. The latter is also where Vance met his wife, Usha. Vance still credits his time in the Marine Corps for his success, telling The American Conservative, "If I had learned helplessness from my environment back home, four years in the Marine Corps taught me something quite different... [It] was basically a four-year education in character and self-management."