Most everyone is familiar with the Tolstoy quotation, "All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."  It's somewhat vague, but it resonates, especially after watching first the film version of J.D. Vance's memoir Hillbilly Elegy, about growing up in a rural Kentucky family that moved to an Ohio steel town, and then the British production of The Crown.  The fourth season of The Crown, the life story of Queen Elizabeth, crowned in 1953, recently launched, in which Queen Elizabeth's children are grown and for the most part miserable.  It is in this series that we meet Diana, the soon to be princess.  She was sadly a pawn in a royal game of arranged marriages.

The royals have little or only passing personal familiarity with the kind of poverty and desperation Vance's book describes, but they are very nearly as unhappy in their own way, perhaps even more so but for different reasons.  The two families have vastly different expectations, of themselves and from the life to which they were born.  The royals unsurprisingly take for granted the magnificent privilege to which they were born; they've never known anything different, but most of them are miserably unhappy.  While the series does not track each child closely, the ones who are part of the story are rarely content, and despite their luxurious lifestyle, one has to feel somewhat sorry for them.  Much is expected of them, but there is little or no affection shown by either parent.  Those four children are expected to live and perform without any outward expressions of love.  Is this true?  Hard to know, but it is what is depicted in the series. 

In contrast, the Vance family of Hillbilly Elegy is poor, angry, and seemingly blighted.  Vance's mother is a drug addict with bad taste in men, but their love for one another is undeniable.  Despite the constant family conflagrations, no one in the Vance family is dumb.  Their lived lives are constantly hard and characterized by poor judgment and poor decisions, but there is a profound love of family underlying their difficult lives that is absent among the royals.

Members of the royal family must behave in the manner expected of them without benefit of any genuine love or affection.  They are born into a role they are expected to fulfill with acceptance and grace but without a shred of tenderness.  The Vance family, on the other hand, is plagued with domestic violence, drug abuse, and poverty, but they love each other fiercely despite the depredations of their daily lives.  They are independent, do not want or take government handouts.

The royal family has lived well on the largesse of the British taxpayers for generations.  Oh, yes, they are extravagantly wealthy in their own right, with castles and homes all over the world, but it is the British taxpayers who fund their astonishingly fabulous monarchical lifestyle. 

Vance's book and the film based on it are hardly the memoir of a wholeheartedly happy family, but this is the story of an essential American family that for generations has strived to survive, to care for the children in the rough and harsh manner in which the members themselves were raised.  It is likely that many successful Americans' lives began similarly to Vance's, families that were impoverished but who held strong, independent values that included the hope that each subsequent generation would succeed beyond its parents and grandparents.  J.D. Vance proved that theorem.

As for the royals, while the present queen is remarkable for her grace, stamina, and wisdom throughout her sixty-seven years as Britain's matriarch, her children and grandchildren may be pampered but sometimes seem as miserable and lost as the members of Vance's family, but with less honesty about their own predicament.  The Vance family and the millions of families like them never presume to be anyone but who they are.  The royals often pretend they can grasp the nature of the lives normal Brits or Americans live when that knowledge is far beyond their ken.

It is a safe bet that if the royal children and grandchildren of the current queen and king of the U.K. read or watched Hillbilly Elegy, they would be horrified by the violence, the self-destructive behavior (to which they are not strangers) but may envy the deep and abiding love that held those hillbilly families together; it's an American thing.  That deep and abiding love for one another seems to be completely lacking among the royals, for whom what one says in public and what one wears in public are all that matters. 

This is of course a superficial reflection of two film renditions of two species of humans so vastly different as to be hardly comparable...yet they are.  It is likely that both film versions have taken many liberties with the truth for the sake of drama.  But the characters of both are all members of families connected by generations of blood, land, the dream of a life well lived and the hope that their children's lives will be better.

Many of those who view both productions who have no experience with either royalty or Appalachia will marvel at the difficulties the members of both extended families endure with humility.  Most of us will feel grateful to be American-born, where men like J.D. Vance, from a dysfunctional but loving hillbilly family, can go to Yale and write a bestselling book.  To be born a royal is something of a curse; to be born into a prescribed role laid out for you hundreds of years before America even existed is and will always be an impossible role to endure or adequately fulfill.