Perks Episode 39 Re-play - Cassie Chambers: Hill Women

This week we wanted to revisit an interview we did with Cassie Chambers.

Ron Howard’s movie adaptation of J. D. Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy starring Amy Adams and Glenn Close has sparked quite a debate bordering on controversy in America this fall about Vance’s assertion as to the motivations and plight of Appalachian people. Many authors from this region have wanted to push back on that a bit to show that Appalachia is complex and not merely a place to rise above.

We welcomed Cassie Chambers as a guest back in March 2020, just as Covid was starting to hit this country in full force. Her memoir HIll Women was written as a response in her own way to Vance’s memoir; about a different view of the Appalachian experience from a woman’s perspective. Cassie’s had some more exciting news in 2020 as she went on to win a seat on the Lousiville Metro City Council as well as becoming a visiting professor at the University of Louisville School of Law.

**Our guest today grew up in poverty in eastern Kentucky, but attended Yale and Harvard, received her law degree, and came back to Kentucky to work for the Legal Aid Society, helping at-risk women in her home state. Cassie Chambers has also written a memoir, called Hill Women: Finding Family and a Way Forward in the Appalachian Mountains, about life and culture in Owsley County through the lens of three generations of women in her own family.

Her book came out in January of this year. Newsweek has named it a must-read book to savor this Spring, and Publisher’s Weekly called it a “passionate memoir”.

Cassie talks to us about her favorite book series from childhood that she still rereads as an adult, why she felt the women of Appalachia specifically need their stories told and what compelled her to write it, and why she thinks more women don’t run for office and why that needs to change.

Books mentioned:
1- Anne of Green Gables series by Lucy Maud Montgomery
2- Castaway: Poems For Our Time by Naomi Shihab Nye
3- Walkable City by Jeff Speck
4- Fair and Tender Ladies by Lee Smith
5- The Wonder by Emma Donoghue
6- Hill Women: Finding Family and a Way Forward in the Appalachian Mountains by Cassie Chambers