In Vance’s best-selling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” he wrote that his late grandmother, whom he called “Mamaw,” helped ... building a bench solely for Bonnie Vance during a discussion ...

Bonnie Blanton Vance, who died in 2005, was a native of Kentucky before moving to Middletown with her husband in the 1940s. In Vance’s book “Hillbilly Elegy,” he credits “Mamaw” with ...

As he did in his memoir, Vance credits his grandmother “Mamaw,” with helping him overcome a harrowing childhood. “I had a guardian angel by my side. She was an old woman who could barely ...