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When I caught up with J.D. Vance, he still sounded a bit bemused by the success of his colorfully titled book, "Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and a Culture in Crisis."

"I was just hoping to get some attention," he told me in a telephone chat as he prepared for a network TV appearance in Washington. "I wasn't expecting nearly this much attention."

No, but nobody was expecting Donald Trump to be the Republican presidential nominee, either -- especially not as a populist hero to a base of white working-class, non-college-educated voters.

That's why, although Trump's name appears nowhere in Vance's book, it quickly rose to Amazon's top 10 amid glowing reviews as a narrative that helps to explain Trump's surprising appeal to the white underclass, the underprivileged group from which its author emerged.

"You cannot understand what's happening now without first reading J.D. Vance," wrote Rod Dreher, senior editor of The American Conservative, after an interview with Vance. "His book does for poor white people what Ta-Nehisi Coates' book did for poor black people: give them voice and presence in the public square."

I agree. Just as Coates' memoir "Between the World and Me" helps us to understand the rise of movements like Black Lives Matter, Vance helps us to understand how shrinking opportunities for low-income whites helped to fuel the rise of Trump.

This narrative has special meaning to me. Vance and I share a lot in common. Born to a Scots-Irish "tribe" in rural Jackson, Ky., Vance, 31, recalls moving with his grandparents to Middletown, Ohio -- the same factory town to which my Alabama-born parents migrated and where I grew up.

Although we are more than a generation apart, his book helped me to see my hometown from the poor white side of town -- and feel as never before how fortunate I was to grow up on the black side of town and, most important, in a more prosperous era.

Our family was "working poor," as my factory worker dad would say, but "rich with spirit," especially in the 1960s as segregation loosened and opportunities opened up for workers of color.

Vance's upbringing, by contrast, was plagued with family and community violence and disorder brought on by alcohol, drugs and other types of dysfunction.

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(c) 2016 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.