Her family was white, but not the right kind of white. They were five star white trash. They borrowed money and tried to buy class.

In this unflinching response to JD Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, Georgiann Davis guides us through her extraordinary life, from weighing almost 300 pounds by fifth grade, to dropping out of school in the seventh and on to selling weed out of her “monkey shit green” Plymouth Neon. A tall, fat girl who only wore boy’s clothing, she grew up with a turbulent family outside of Chicago: the larger-than-life mother who looked like Farah Fawcett, the father who understood cars better than children, the brother whose drug use went unchecked, and the Greek grandparents who could only love her from afar. Then there was the shocking medical secret kept from her–one that upended everything she thought she knew about herself, gender, and the human body.

As Davis chronicles her surprising journey from middle-school dropout to professor, she reveals how whiteness colored her family’s struggles. She connects her personal experiences of medical abuse, fatphobia, and fear of the intersex body with incisive critiques of whiteness, the opioid crisis, and gendered and queer oppression. Faced with unimaginable setbacks, Davis relentlessly pursued education. It was this quest that transformed her life, giving her the tools to tell her own story.

The book is published by New York University Press. The audiobook is published by University Press Audiobooks.