Themes of place, home, and belonging are through lines in Appalachian discourse, and Emilee Hackney’s debut memoir, All That’s Unseen, tackles them with a sharp eye for nuance. As Hackney traces her way from rural Tazewell, Virginia, to the halls of Harvard (and back again), her understanding of her home evolves with her, and what results is an honest and compelling reckoning.
In the first chapter, she describes being “awed by the mountains” even as a toddler: “I feel as if I were born from them, as if my bones were formed from their dirt.” She is an eighth-generation Appalachian growing up in the coalfields of southwest Virginia who feels bound to the land “by something more sacred, more mysterious, than mere blood and history.”
When Hackney is a little girl, her mother begins taking her to Deliverance Church, a nearby Pentecostal congregation. Her mother, who was raised Baptist, is drawn to the church because it allows congregants to worship however they like: “It was religion undone, fresh and expansive.” During services, people scream praises to Jesus while running up and down the aisles, they speak in tongues, they sob before the alter. And though it seems intense, Hackney finds it “right.”
But the church is ultimately what enables one of the most formative experiences of her young life. When she is fourteen, an eighteen-year old, Sam, begins to court her affections. They date, and nearly marry shortly after she turns eighteen. Only a shocking revelation prevents the marriage from taking place.
As her engagement falls apart, she is enrolled in community college and working at Subway. Sam had felt negatively about her pursuing an education, but after they separate, she takes a shot in the dark and applies to Harvard as a transfer student. To her shock, she gets in.
Hackney spends her final months in Tazewell imagining her life at Harvard being filled by “little cafés and big cozy libraries and cavernous lecture halls with brilliant professors.” But when she finally moves, she finds herself newly isolated. She struggles to connect with the students at Harvard, especially as her accent deems her so outwardly other. Studying also becomes a problem—although she was valedictorian at her high school and made good grades at her community college, she realizes quickly that she has no idea how to study for her classes at Harvard, and her grades suffer.
In one painful scene, she attends office hours for a biology class, and the professor immediately asks where she’s from on account of her accent. She tells him that she’s from southwest Virginia, and he asks, “Coal country?” When she says yes, he begins to inquire about the local economy, and snidely asks if she thinks coal mining can be sustained in the wake of renewable energy. She leaves office hours with no clarity about the class, and reflects: “I was from an abhorrent black hole of rural southern conservatism, which was all anyone heard every time I opened my mouth … I felt like a zoo animal, a specimen.” Ultimately, she fails the midterm for his class and drops it.
The alienation she feels at Harvard initially strengthens the sense of belonging she feels in Virginia. When she returns for winter break, she comes with a new lens through which to view her home: “Now the city was my reference point. Two landscapes, two experiences, rallying against each other. Here versus there. This versus that.”
Throughout her time at Harvard she finds herself rejecting the school and the northeast and trying to embrace her identity as Appalachian, even as she senses that her education is making her an outsider at home: “In Cambridge, my Appalachian roots meant I was ignorant and conservative. In Tazewell, my Harvard education meant I was the opposite.” So she breaks up with her Harvard boyfriend and starts going out with a boy she’d known in high school. She goes four-wheeling and off-roading and attends bonfires and drinks cheap beer and shoots empty cans for target practice. But ultimately, she reflects, “the life I lived that summer wasn’t my life, not really … It was forced and false. A caricature of the very stereotypes I had spent the past year denying.”
When she returns to Harvard, she is enrolled in a writing workshop where she begins work on a series of essays about her time growing up in Appalachia. Her professor, acclaimed writer Michael Pollan, pushes her to think more deeply about her relationship with her home. “Ask yourself what it means to be from Appalachia,” he tells her, in order to help readers understand. Interrogating her past forces her to confront norms she’d accepted without thought. Pollan asks her specifically, “In what world is it okay for an eighteen-year-old to date a fourteen-year-old?” As she digs into writing and research about the region for this workshop and her other courses, she writes: “Funny … how my distance from home made me see it more clearly.”
Still, she finds herself clinging to the security of home and then rejecting again. The coronavirus pandemic shuts down Harvard during her last semester and she goes back to Virginia, returning to the same part-time job she’d been working during breaks from school. And although she wants to stay, she realizes that the state of the economy makes that impossible. Yet there remains a grief: “Leaving Appalachia, especially for the second time, felt like a judgement, a declaration: This is not enough for me. I loved Appalachia. I did. But right now, I couldn’t stay.”
The magic of this memoir is its ability to allow for complexity. Hackney lovingly paints her family and her mountain home, but she doesn’t shy away from their faults. For example, she writes about her parents stealing from her and her brother’s piggy banks as children in order to pay bills, but never allows this act to be either excused by financial necessity or condemned as a whole-hearted moral failing.
People and places are allowed to exist in a realistically complicated fashion, which feels refreshingly humanistic after the success of another “Appalachian” memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, which for years dominated the conversation on the national stage with its largely one-note portrayal of the region. All That’s Unseen offers an alternative narrative, one of a historically exploited region with people who are often trying their best, who are often kind, who are often misled, who sometimes fail. But as Hackney concludes in the final pages of her memoir, “there is space for the whole of a thing.”