Unveiling Hidden Truths: Emilee Hackney’s Appalachian Memoir Reveals What Lies Beneath the Surface
Eventually, seeing things that are not great at all, that Sam would prefer to keep unseen, jolts her awake. It’s the beginning of a spiritual reckoning that Hackney traces unflinchingly, a slow, fraught process that truly begins once she transfers to the Ivy League after two years at community college. “I was going to make something of myself, and be somebody, and be healed, and be happy.”
And it’s there that she encounters non-stop thoughtlessness and lack of acceptance so profound, they threaten to drive her from school. Yet at home on break, she finds no solace. She’s lost her faith in Pentecostal big-G God, a precarious position in a place where people frequently launch into stories in coffee shops and the aisles at Walmart, exclaiming over how the big guy is working in their lives. Every single person she meets knows she’s the girl who got into that fancy Yankee school and assumes that she must now believe she’s All That. It’s a funhouse mirror of her school experience; their comments, spoken and silent, reaffirm the stereotypes they hold of community ex-pats who head north and get a little too big for their britches.
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