How The Childhoods Of Harris And Vance Explain This Campaign’s Big Divide

One major-party candidate wrote a memoir that focuses on how growing up the child of a single mother shaped the person they’ve become and how they see the world.

I’m not talking about JD Vance.

Yes, his bestselling “Hillbilly Elegy” did all of that, and went on to become a political and cultural phenomenon. The book’s fame, including a movie adaptation, boosted Vance in his successful U.S. Senate bid from Ohio, which in turn put him in position to become Republican Donald Trump’s vice presidential running mate in the 2024 campaign.

But Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris also wrote a memoir, 2019′s “The Truths We Hold.” It didn’t become a movie, but it did sell pretty well. And, like “Hillbilly Elegy,” the book describes parents divorcing when the author was very young and what it’s like to grow up primarily with a single mother.

That’s where the similarities between the two stories end — and the insights into one of this presidential campaign’s most important divides begin.

The divide plays out every day on the campaign trail, in the form of policy arguments about everything from abortion rights to child care. But behind those fights is a more fundamental clash over changes in gender roles and family structure in the past 50 years, and to what degree society should embrace them.

Harris welcomes these shifts; Vance argues for going back to the way things were before. And if their memoirs are indicative, both views have something to do with the circumstances of the candidates’ respective upbringings — or, at least, how they remember them.

For Harris, Hope From A Happy Childhood

Harris’ mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was a cancer researcher who came from India to study at the University of California, Berkeley. Juggling school and then work with parenting must have been tough, especially in the 1960s and early 1970s, when there was still a ton of stigma around divorce and divorced women in particular.

But if these challenges made Gopalan’s life difficult in ways that filtered down to Harris or her sister, Maya Harris, there are no signs of it in “The Truths We Hold.” On the contrary, Kamala Harris writes, “Those early days were happy and carefree.” Even Harris’ recollections of her parents’ divorce are gentle. Her parents simply “stopped being kind to each other,” she writes. “I knew they loved each other very much, but it seemed they’d become like oil and water.”

A big factor in Harris’ childhood, according to the memoir, was the support Gopalan got from neighbors and others — especially Regina Shelton, a family friend whom Harris describes as a “second mother.” Shelton fostered several children and ran a small nursery school in her home, the memoir says. Shelton’s residence was “where Maya and I would spend our afternoons. We simply called it going to ‘the house.’ There were always children running around at the house; lots of laughter and joyful play,” Harris says.

These gauzy recollections likely leave out a lot. Memoir authors are not always the most faithful narrators. That’s especially true if they are politicians with aspirations for higher office, as Harris would have been in early 2019, when she was a first-term senator about to launch a presidential bid.

But however rose-colored Harris’ memoir might be, it also seems to be a genuine expression of her values. A through line of Harris’ career in politics is a push for programs and laws that could enable more people to do what her mother did — thrive personally and professionally, even if they don’t conform to traditional expectations of gender roles and family structure.

You can see this impulse in Harris’ history of support for government programs to fund child and elder care, and to ensure paid leave. You can also see it in Harris’ fight for reproductive and LGBTQ+ rights, which in their own, different ways make it easier to form families that defy the 1950s stereotype of a man earning a living while a woman stays home to cook, clean and change diapers.

Harris is still promoting these ideas. Her policy agenda includes calls for guaranteed paid leave and capping child care expenses at 7% of household income, along with the staunch defense of reproductive rights.

All of this is standard Democratic dogma. Most of her ideas are longtime party positions or come straight out of budgets from President Joe Biden’s administration. The 7% child care cap was part of the Build Back Better legislation that Democrats tried unsuccessfully to pass in 2021.

But Harris has consistently given these issues prominent billing in her speeches, frequently tying them to her own personal experiences — like she did this past week in Pittsburgh, where she described caring for her mother in her final days before linking support for caregivers to the ability of women to stay in the workforce.

“When we lower the costs and ease the burdens people face, we will not only make it then easier for them to meet their obligations as caregivers,” Harris said in the Pennsylvania city. “We will also make it more possible for them to go to work and pursue their economic aspirations.”

For Vance, Scars Of A Difficult Youth

Vance in his memoir paints a much bleaker picture, of a difficult, tumultuous childhood in a broken home that he barely escapes.

The main source of instability is his mother, Beverly Aikins, who cycles through jobs, addictions and male partners. The main source of rescue, eventually, is Aikins’ mother, Bonnie Vance. Bonnie Vance is the one who ultimately raises JD Vance, he writes, although he notes that “Mamaw” had her own history of addiction and her own tempestuous relationship with his grandfather. Once, she doused “Papaw” with gasoline, Vance recounts in one of the memoir’s most memorable stories, and lit him on fire.

But there is one important difference between his mother and grandmother. Bonnie Vance stayed with her husband, in a way that JD Vance found admirable — and still does. “My grandparents had an incredibly chaotic marriage in a lot of ways,” he told a high school audience in 2021, “but they never got divorced, right? They were together to the end, till death do us part. That was a really important thing to my grandmother and my grandfather.”

In those comments, Vance was making a larger point about modern society — and where, in his view, it has gone wrong. “This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace,” he said, “which is this idea that, like, ‘Well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy. And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term.’”

Conservatives have been making arguments like these for decades, as a way to push back against the scientific, cultural and legal changes — like the development of hormonal birth control, and the spread of no-fault divorce laws — transforming American family life. In the 1970s, the importance of protecting traditional families was a rally cry for opponents of universal child care and the Equal Rights Amendment, and decades later it united people fighting against same-sex marriage too.

That particular crusade eventually failed, to the point where same-sex marriage now enjoys robust, widespread approval. The same has happened with other major societal changes, like women having the freedom to pursue work outside the home. It was a controversial idea in the 1960s, when Gopalan was looking at cancer cells under a microscope. And as late as 1987, nearly a third of adults in the country thought women should return to their “traditional” role in society, according to the Pew Research Center. That figure was under 20% in more recent years.

But plenty of conservatives have not made peace with these shifts away from traditional family structures. Vance appears to be one of them. In addition to making that suggestion about “violent” marriages, he infamously told then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson that the Democratic Party was in the thrall of “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”

Vance tried to dispel the controversy over those remarks by saying they were a joke and taken out of context, though he never sufficiently explained what was supposed to be funny or what context was missing, or why he’d made similar comments other times as well. And he’s not the only influential voice on the political right who thinks these things, or is trying to translate them into policy.

Republicans in some heavily Republican-leaning states have advocated for endingno-fault divorce, for example. Project 2025, a proposed governing agenda from the right-wing Heritage Foundation, calls for reversing Biden-era policies “focusing on ‘LGBTQ+ equity,’ subsidizing single-motherhood, disincentivizing work, and penalizing marriage” — because, the document explains, families “comprised of a married mother, father, and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society.”

For America, A Stark Choice About Policy — And Family

As strange as it sounds, it’s possible to imagine a world in which liberals who see things as Harris does and conservatives who think like Vance does could find some common ground, and even learn a thing or two from one another.

It could happen on an issue like child care: Conservatives note accurately that different families benefit from different care settings, with some preferring that a parent stay at home, while liberals point out correctly that whether parents want or need to work, the reality is that many can’t afford outside help without the kind of financial assistance that would require dramatically more government spending.

There’s actually been some modest bipartisan progress on child care in recent years, with both major political parties agreeing to increase funds for the existing federal program that underwrites subsidized child care for poor families. There’s also been on-again, off-again discussion of Democrats and Republicans coming together on some kind of direct cash benefit for families with young children — something that was used temporarily during the COVID-19 pandemic, and for a while brought child poverty rates down to record lows.

Harris has called for reinstating a version of that program. Vance has said he too would like to see some kind of cash allowance for families with children, although he skipped the vote when Senate Democrats brought forward a bill about the issue in August. And however real or imaginary the prospect for bipartisan action on such causes might be, it’s obviously not possible when it comes to issues like reproductive or LGBTQ+ rights.

What families should look like, how gender roles should or shouldn’t keep shifting — the visions of the two parties are as different as the stories Harris and Vance tell about themselves. It’s upside versus downside, enthusiasm versus dread. Come November, voters get to decide which narrative speaks to their own experience more.