Reviewed by Nan J. Bauer
Emilee Hackney never refers to herself, or anyone she grew up with, as a hillbilly.
That assessment comes courtesy of her Ivy League peers and teachers. They lob it at her as soon as they hear her accent; “I’ve never heard stairs pronounced with two syllables before!” says one with the glee of discovering a real-life gnome. Nearly everyone she meets in Cambridge views Hackney’s home of Appalachia—she pronounces it with short a’s, as in “latch”—as a coal-dust-covered, Trump-loving, opioid-addicted, cousin-marrying monolith.
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.”
The wailing and miracles inside the sanctuary supplement a childhood grounded in fantastic stories: grandparents who whisper magic words and swear they’ve seen snakes swallow birds whole, a father who faces off with a bear and kills him with a silver bullet. Yet Hackney resists making her childhood any kind of idyll. When her father worked as a coal miner, he and her mother regularly raided not just Hackney’s piggy bank but her younger brother’s to pay the rent. Financial salvation arrived via a job as a coal mine manager; suddenly, her family regularly drove miles to stock up at TJ Maxx and Walmart, only to get side-eye at school. “The shame of being poor was nothing like the shame of being rich.”
And then there is the shame heaped on hormonal adolescents by Deliverance Christian, where, as a fourteen-year-old, she meets Sam, a dreamy senior who intends to marry her as soon as she turns 16. Sam plans to become a minister—though throughout their “engagement,” he spends his time, not at any type of seminary, but slacking off at his Mexican restaurant job. Any prodding to contribute to a nest egg for their upcoming nuptials results in a reprimand that Hackney is simply not trusting God. He will provide. Where is her faith?
Watching Hackney continue to insist on the relationship is somewhat akin to being stuck in a movie in which someone continually returns to their demon-possessed house; a couple of times, I caught myself murmuring, Emilee, NO. Sam gaslights, nags, whines, and talks her into participating in Domestic Discipline, basically a church-sanctioned type of BDSM. And while Hackney’s parents are always against the relationship, she listens instead to church leaders, who continually bring up a verse in St. Paul about wives submitting to their husbands, and reinforce how Sam is singled out for great things by the Lord.
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.
Feeling spiritually and culturally homeless, Hackney turns to joyless sex, drinking binges, and antidepressants. It’s only when she’s encouraged to write by three influential teachers—one of whom is Michael Pollan—that Hackney begins, finally, to navigate the vast and varied reality beneath the unforgiving and ugly surface perceptions. An essay on tomatoes opens her eyes to the whole world of Appalachia that no one sees, that needs to be seen.
Always, there is balance. She counters a memory of her maternal grandfather as a kind, silent, sober man with her mother’s experience of the same man before he quit booze: a lugubrious drunk who railed against the “upper echelon” that was keeping him down. Visiting a cemetery, she notes how “[t]heir headstones were scattered among rainbow polyester bouquets of an open-armed Jesus, whose pale stone skin was veiled with mold.”
Hackney’s age is not listed, but context clues put her under 30; the energy of youth burst out of the book. Yes, it’s sprawling. Yes, her path is pretty messy. What a relief that she doesn’t try to make it neat, to impart lessons, but instead generously invites us to explore the map of her life right by her side. By the end, like her, I can’t wait to see where she goes next.
Nan Bauer is a writer currently based in Southeast Michigan, and is completing a memoir on life on the front lines of AIDS during the late 80s in New York and Key West. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times and here at Hippocampus Magazine; her Substack,Oh Yes I Did, is updated weekly. Check out her Look of the Week and Book of the Week reels: @nanjbauer.