Five Star White Trash : A Memoir of Fraud and Family.

Author/creator Davis, Georgiann
Format Electronic
Publication InfoNew York : New York University Press, 2025.
Description1 online resource (230 pages)
Supplemental ContentFront cover, high quality
Supplemental ContentFront cover thumbnail
Supplemental ContentJSTOR
Subjects

Abstract An unforgettable journey from seventh-grade dropout to celebrated professor 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. With unflinching candor and dark humor, Davis tells her 'stranger-than-fiction' life story in a brave voice that will have readers rooting for her. 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--identity theft, home eviction, medical trauma, and family betrayal--Davis relentlessly pursued education. It was this quest that transformed her life, giving her the tools to tell her own story. The result is a deeply moving memoir which complicates our understanding of upward mobility and familial love.
General noteDescription based upon print version of record.
Issued in other formPrint version: Davis, Georgiann Five Star White Trash New York : New York University Press,c2025 9781479840397
Genre/formElectronic books.
ISBN1479840432 (electronic bk.)
ISBN9781479840434 (electronic bk.)
Stock number22573/cats29542900 JSTOR