JD Vance’s journey to the White House is quite an astounding one. The 40-year-old, from Middletown, Ohio, shot to relative stardom when he released his memoir Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis in 2016.

Following a career in the military and a short stint as a venture capitalist, he is now the Vice President of the United States. However, though Vance has had a successful political career thus far, his year began with some health issues. In January, he had to undergo surgery.

JD Vance’s childhood was not what many might have expected. Born in Middleton, Ohio, he grew up with his half-sister, Lindsay Vance. Their mother was a drug addict. When he was only a child, Vance’s mother and father divorced, and as the years went by, his mom showed violent tendencies.

Vance experienced many tragic days as a child, and in an interview with NPR, he touched on some incidents which he also wrote about in his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. It later became a film by Ron Howard named Hillbilly Elegy, starring Amy Adams and Glenn Close.

In the NPR interview, Vance recalled the terrifying moment his mother threatened to crash their car, killing both her son and daughter.

“[I] hopped in the back seat to hide from her. And this got her really angry. And she stopped the car and pulled over and, I think, was going to start hitting me. And so I ran,” Vance said.

It ended with a lawsuit against his mother, before Vance and Lindsay were free. They were adopted by their grandparents, and while things weren’t necessarily easy, the half-siblings had each other.