Nearly two months since JD Vance’s most recent memoir, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, was released, and following sales of 64,000 copies in its first week, Vance’s hometown of Middletown, Ohio, has had time to take it in.
At the town library, administrators say there has been interest in the book among the wider public.
“It’s been one of our most popular [books]. It’s been No 2 in adult nonfiction since 9 June,” says Cari Hillman of the MidPointe Library System, noting that Mel Robbins’s The Let Them Theory, published in 2024, has kept Vance off the top spot. The local library system, which includes five branches and a bookmobile, has 20 copies of Vance’s book; as of 27 July, 11 were checked out.
Joe Mulligan, a member of the Republican party who serves on Middletown’s city council, said he hadn’t read the book yet but planned to “soon”.
He said that while there were no current city plans to mark the publication of the book, it “could be an opportunity for the city’s churches and faith communities to discuss the role that faith and communion with our neighbors can help build up each other and to work together”.
As a practicing Catholic, Mulligan said, he admires Vance’s life story.
“We can be grateful for the important role that Middletown, Ohio, played in vice-president Vance’s life,” he says. “The job opportunities for his grandfather cured poverty for multiple generations of Vances. And the young JD himself was employed as a youth at Dillman Foods, a local grocery store not far from his Mamaw’s house.”
Vance is seen as a frontrunner for the Republican party’s 2028 presidential race and candidates from both parties have a long history of releasing personal memoirs in the lead-up to a presidential campaign bid.
But among Middletown’s general public, the vice-president’s new book hasn’t exactly hit home, and on the city’s streets many residents are uneasy about sharing their opinion on Vance or his writings.
Inside the Middletown library building, there’s no sign of Communion on the wall of nonfiction new releases (the book was released on 16 June). Instead, there’s another religious-themed book – Rebel: Following Jesus When the World Walks the Other Way by musician Anne Wilson – among more than a dozen titles taking pride of place.
Inside the Butler county Republican party headquarters several miles east of downtown Middletown, there are signs from the Trump-Vance 2024 campaign and several more in the window depicting Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican candidate in the November election for Ohio governor.
But there are no signs of copies of or promotional material for Vance’s book. The front door was locked on a recent afternoon, and emails sent by the Guardian asking whether the party planned any events to mark the vice-president’s new book were not responded to. The phone number attached to the office window was no longer in service when the Guardian attempted to call.
In the 2024 presidential election, in Butler county – where Middletown sits – some 62% of voters picked the Trump-Vance ticket. But that enthusiasm has not universally translated to the book’s popularity, it seems.
“I haven’t read or even seen a copy of Communion … So far, I haven’t found anyone who has read it,” says a Catholic priest who has served in Middletown for decades but declined to speak on the record.
“Some [residents] have read the reviews. People obviously have their opinions on JD.”
Fr Henry Stephan, the priest who baptized Vance at St Gertrude’s church in Cincinnati in 2019, and whose name appears in the book’s acknowledgements, declined an interview. Vance was baptized after moving back to Ohio and starting a venture capitalist effort.
The department chair of theology at Middletown’s Catholic high school, Bishop Fenwick high school, also declined to comment. A person who runs a local book club said they didn’t expect their group to review Communion as its members don’t discuss political publications “as not everyone agrees on political views”. Emails sent to the Middletown city council administration asking whether an event was being planned to mark the release of the town’s most-famous son’s book weren’t responded to.
The town’s only independent bookstore, Crab Apple Books, closed in 2024. Down the street, at a comics bookstore, a manager declined to comment on Vance or his writing efforts, citing the business’s apolitical stance.
Vance’s family migrated from Appalachian Kentucky to industrial south-west Ohio almost a century ago, where the manufacturing industry boomed until the 1990s, in search of jobs. Religion was not a major part of his childhood.
And while his 2016 book Hillbilly Elegy was seen as offering a unique window into the motivations behind rural and working-class America’s turn towards Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election – selling more than 1.6m copies by July 2024, when Trump chose Vance as his presidential running mate – his latest publication has received an altogether more muted response from reviewers.
One of the more apparent faults observers find is that the church depicted on the cover of Communion is not, in fact, a Catholic church.
Mulligan, however, says that’s not a big deal. “I do not believe that the cover image should distract from the message of the text,” he says. “That’s probably true for any book cover.”
In Communion, Vance mentions Carol’s Speakeasy, a dive bar close to Interstate 75 where, as a college student, the vice-president once went to “play darts and tell stories” with a lovesick friend.
But a manager who answered the phone recently said they hadn’t read the book, didn’t intend to read it, nor was aware that the bar was mentioned in Communion.
Carol, the bar’s owner, was in Florida, the manager said, and could therefore not be reached to comment on the book.
