Is family important in Hillbilly Elegy? How?

The subtitle of Hillbilly Elegy is A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, so it is clear that family shapes the author's narrative.
Although J. D. Vance's mother is almost never a positive influence on his life, as she struggles with financial and alcohol difficulties for his entire childhood, he still tries to forge a relationship with her over and over again because she is his family. His mother further complicates his childhood with a revolving list of men who enter and exit their lives, blurring the lines of who constitutes J. D.'s family.

Mom brought these men into our lives for the right reasons. She often wondered aloud whether Chip or Bob or Steve made good "father figures."

J. D. longs for a sense of a true and stable family:

One of the worst parts, honestly, was that Bob's departure would further complicate the tangled web of last names in our family. Lindsay was a Lewis (her dad's last name), Mom took the last name of whichever husband she was married to, Mawmaw and Papaw were Vances, and all of Mamaw's brothers were Blantons. I shared a name with no one I really cared about (which bothered me already), and with Bob gone, explaining why my name was J.D. Hamel would require a few additional awkward moments. "Yeah, my legal father's last name is Hamel. You haven't met him because I don't see him. No, I don't know why I don't see him."

It is this longing for a deep connection with family that drives J. D. to make different choices in his own adult life, marrying a former law school classmate with a stable career and devoting himself to his own son.
In his childhood, this sense of connection is primarily served through his relationship with his grandparents—kind and gracious people who know their daughter's shortcomings and try to take care of their grandchildren. Mawmaw counsels J. D. in matters of fighting, religion, education, and his mother. Sometimes she provides tough love, and sometimes she provides a soft spot to land, but she is a constant in J. D.'s life, which his mother lacks the stability to provide. When Papaw dies, J. D.'s world is turned upside down as the family struggles to regroup, and J. D. feels for the first time that he is a burden on his Mawmaw, though she never says so. He decides that although he is a teenager, he needs to learn to stand on his own two feet, showing some of the independence that his grandparents have instilled in him over the years.

Most of all I thought about Papaw and me. I thought about the hours we spent practicing increasingly complex math problems. He taught me that lack of knowledge and lack of intelligence were not the same. The former could be remedied with a little patience and a lot of hard work.

In this spirit, J. D. begins to change his life's trajectory, becoming more serious about putting himself on a different path than his mother and eventually graduating from Yale Law School.
Although J. D.'s mother doesn't do anything directly to aid in this career path, watching her make one tragic mistake after another in her life choices propels him to make a different life for himself. And using the strength he gains from the support of his grandparents in the absence of any true parental support, J. D. does forge a different path in life, showing that his family shapes his future both directly and indirectly.

Family is hugely important to J.D. Vance, as it is to most people who live in the Appalachians. This is a part of the world where extended networks of family and kinship shape and give meaning to people's lives. The economic climate may be harsh, and times are usually hard, but at the end of the day there's always family to fall back on. To a large extent—and for both good and ill—Vance is a product of his family life. Although family is important to him, that doesn't mean it's always been a positive influence in his life; sometimes it's been quite the opposite, as we see for example with his mother's drug addiction. But despite everything else, it's ultimately Vance's extended family that sees him through the hard times and allows him to come out on the other side. In a part of the world where poverty, alcoholism, and drug abuse are rife, that's a vital source of strength and comfort to him and countless others.

Family is a major part of J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy. Using his family to compare and contrast, Vance describes the many struggles facing the rural people of the United State's Appalachian region, which runs from southern New York to northern Mississippi. Many of Vance's family members suffer from the typical problems that plague Appalachian individuals, such as alcoholism and drug abuse, violence, family instability, and lack of access to quality education and opportunities. While Vance laments the troubles that his family and many others succumb to, he also praises his grandmother (Mamaw) and other members of his family for encouraging him to break the cycle of poverty.

Family is a major theme in Hillbilly Elegy. J.D. Vance’s memoir follows the lives of his family members as they struggle to come out ahead in Appalachia. Holding his own family up as an example of hillbilly culture, Vance examines the ways in which his family life both resembled and differed from that of his friends and neighbors in Appalachia. Like many other families in Appalachia, Vance’s family members fell on hard times when the coal and steel industries began to decline. His grandparents married young and, like many other families in the area, became parents at a young age. The early years of his grandparents’ marriage were filled with frequent fights and physical confrontations—mostly due to Papaw’s drinking problem. Vance’s mother was greatly affected by this turbulent home environment and was eventually forced to drop out of high school when she became pregnant. Like many other Appalachian families, Vance’s family struggled with poverty and drug abuse. When Vance’s mother became addicted to drugs, it seemed that Vance’s childhood would inevitably be just as chaotic and damaging as her own. Luckily, Mamaw and Papaw (now sober) intervened and took Vance in, breaking the cycle of dysfunction. Vance’s story stresses the effect of family on the individual: while a dysfunctional or toxic family can break someone down, a supportive and stable family can help someone rise to success.