What is the author's perspective in the nonfiction book, What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia?

Even though Catte’s book is historical nonfiction, she writes in first-person perspective – as stated above, she occasionally uses her own voice to place her own experiences within context of the historical and contemporary facts that make up her argument. It is important to note that Catte herself is Appalachian; her family is from East Tennessee, and she currently lives in Shenandoah Valley, Virginia with her husband. It is clear, then, that she is personally invested in arguing against Vance’s reductive stereotyping because, as she writes, according to his view people like her “should not exist” (7). One of the aims of her book is to correct the idea that all of Appalachia can be understood as a certain kind of individual, usually a white, impoverished, “backwards” mountaineer.

It is important to note that Catte does not sacrifice argumentative rigor and factual evidence in the process of defending Appalachians from negative portrayals, such as the ones found in Vance’s book. Since she is trained as a scholar, her work reads as scholarship, and the use of the first-person acts as a means of suitable for a book that is to be read for the general public. Her book is so thoroughly researched that it in no way resembles a personal memoir, and significantly, Catte does not defer to personal experience as justification for an argument.