Unveiling Hidden Truths: Emilee Hackney’s Appalachian Memoir Reveals What Lies Beneath the Surface
By the time the insults show up, I was bristling almost as much as Hackney. I’d spent the first half of her just-released memoir All That’s Unseen: An Appalachian Memoir (Penguin Press; July 2026) seeing the very real place and people that nurtured and formed her.
This is, thankfully, not an elegy, homage, or gooey recounting of a childhood and adolescence in coal country; it’s a sincere, sharply observed portrait, equal parts blistering and tender. We sit inside the Pentecostal church where Hackney grew up, Deliverance Christian, a red T forming the cross. Barely more than a toddler, she feels herself begin to melt under the weight of “a mysterious and all-consuming force: powerful enough to drive me to the ground, and heavy enough to hold me there.”
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