In some ways I started working on this book almost a decade ago, when I first reported on a drop in the life expectancies of the least educated white women, and, to a lesser extent, men. Any group that moves backward in life expectancy is experiencing something bad, and I thought this was due in part to increasing inequality. Not just income inequality, but inequality of opportunity. All of that is partly tied into geography, and I thought geographic inequality was an unexplored dimension of class in America. This is something that I felt I really knew intuitively because I’d come from a very rural part of Arkansas, raised by working-class parents—my dad was a plumber who died at 55 and my mom quit work when she had my youngest sister, and then picked up odd jobs throughout her life until she started working full-time again when my dad got sick—and then went to an elite college and lived kind of on the sidelines of a very elite world as an adult. Throughout my adulthood I could see the big and small ways that where we’re from shape our lives, and the inequalities that are kind of baked in early on, and as a journalist I’d been most interested in exploring those geographic and systemic inequalities.

I think a lot about the divides in America that we see and those we don’t see. I don’t want to generalize too much because there is some diversity in rural America but the very, very remote rural regions, especially in the South, that are overwhelmingly white, dominated by evangelical Christians in positions of power—are just coming from a different place than almost everyone else. They have a different view of what it means to be American and what the U.S. should strive to be, they’re increasingly voting with one party, and they’re expressing their worldviews in their political choices. The people in those areas live in a bubble, so they think they’re the true majority of the United States, and don’t very often come into contact with someone who has an entirely different life experience or point of view. Rural America overall makes up less than 20 percent of the population, but they have outsized political power because of the Electoral College and gerrymandering and composition of Congress. So that 20 percent of the population can have a lot of power even as the actual majority of U.S. citizens, increasingly urban and diverse, is making completely different choices.

I hope that one of the things that people take from my book is a sense of the complexity of social life in rural America. I wrote about one person who struggled throughout her life, but part of the reason she struggled is that there is a culture of power here that works to enforce conformity and exclude people who don’t fit into what they think is an acceptable way of life. I think people have a romantic notion of what it means to live in rural America, but the truth is that it’s filled with people: some of them are mean, some of them are judgmental, some of them make mistakes they can’t recover from. Where I’m from there’s a constant, relentless pressure to worship as a Christian in the way people here define what that means. There isn’t a very vibrant civic life and so people’s week’s revolve around church, and that can become very atomized and isolating. The people who run the show in my hometown are extremely resistant to change. I hope my efforts to illustrate that complexity are useful to people who might be unfamiliar with it, and can shape how we approach things going forward.