Vice President JD Vance is set to publish a second memoir next month, and the first excerpt, released over Mother's Day weekend, offers a window into the personal story behind one of the most prominent marriages in American public life. The book is called "Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith," and it arrives June 16 from Harper.
The excerpt, published exclusively by USA Today, traces Vance's first encounter with Usha Bala Chilukuri during their first year at Yale Law School in New Haven, Connecticut. It reads like a love story told by a man who didn't expect one, a Marine veteran from Middletown, Ohio, who walked into an elite institution and found the person who would change the trajectory of his life.
Vance told USA Today that the book is about his journey to faith, but that romance sits at its center. In a statement timed for Mother's Day, he said:
"A critical part of that journey was falling in love with a girl who would eventually become a mother four times over."
The excerpt opens not at Yale but at Carol's Speakeasy in Middletown, where Vance took his best friend Mike over Christmas break. Mike had just gone through a breakup, his girlfriend Jessica had ended things, and Vance was trying to cheer him up. They played darts, drank, and told stories. Vance, in his telling, tried to play the encouraging friend.
"Plus," Vance wrote that he told Mike, "I'm single, and when we get back to Columbus, I can be your wingman. There are plenty of fish in the sea."
Mike pushed back, asking whether Vance had ever really been in love. The answer was honest and unflattering. Vance had been dating a woman named Mary for a couple of years during and after college, but he admitted the relationship lacked something essential.
"I've just never fallen head over heels for a girl. Some are better and some are worse. I could rate Mary on all these objective criteria, and she's mostly great. But would I sob if she broke up with me? No way. Isn't that a problem?"
Mike told him maybe Mary wasn't the right girl. Vance wasn't so sure. He wondered whether he simply didn't have the capacity. "Dude, I don't think I have that gene or something," he wrote.
A few months later, Vance was a couple of months into his first year of law school. And the gene, it turned out, was working fine.
Usha Bala Chilukuri was in Vance's small group, the collection of sixteen students with whom he shared all of his first-year classes. What struck him wasn't the usual law-school ambition. It was the opposite. While many of their classmates schemed for prestigious clerkships and six-figure firm jobs, Usha told Vance her dream was to run the Sesame Workshop because she loved kids and the idea of making educational programming that appealed to them.
Vance, who has since built a political career partly on the theme of family and its place in American life, was captivated by that answer. He called Mike to tell him what was happening.
"Dude, I think I'm obsessed with this chick in my small group. It's unhealthy."
Then he described her in terms that don't sound like a future vice president, they sound like a guy who's been knocked sideways.
"She doesn't even walk like normal people. Normal girls seem kind of unstable in high heels. Not her. She glides across the room in whatever shoes she wears. And her laugh, man. Whenever she laughs it's, like, the most wonderful thing. She's super reserved, but she has this chortle that is the best sound I've ever heard."
Mike's response, as Vance tells it, was pointed. "JD? Remember when you told me you don't have the gene where you fall head over heels for a girl? I always thought that was BS. Now I know it is."
One of the sharper passages in the excerpt deals with what Vance saw as the gap between ambition and merit at Yale. He described classmates who were aggressive about their careers but unimpressive in substance, and then there was Usha, who had the talent but none of the hunger for status.
"There's something a little jacked up about all of this," Vance wrote. "The least impressive person at this school is the most ambitious. But the most impressive just wants to have a family and a decent job."
He told Usha directly: "You have the biggest mismatch between ambition and ability of any person I've ever met. You could be the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and you have no interest in it."
Her answer, "I just want interesting work", clearly stuck with him. In a political culture that rewards relentless self-promotion, Vance presents his wife as someone who never played that game. Whether readers see that as modesty or as a deliberate contrast with the Ivy League strivers Vance has spent years criticizing, the portrait is consistent with the populist conservatism he has championed on the national stage.
Vance's growing political profile makes the timing of this book notable. A sitting vice president publishing a memoir about faith and marriage is not a neutral act. It is, at minimum, a signal about the kind of public figure Vance intends to be, and the values he wants associated with his name.
The excerpt reveals that Vance moved fast. He broke up with Mary, "in part because of the long distance, but mostly because I couldn't imagine settling for anyone else," he wrote. He and Usha began dating in law school. Only a few weeks into the relationship, Vance told her he wanted to marry her.
"I will marry this girl," he wrote. "Or I will be a lifelong bachelor."
Their first summer together as a couple, they were physically apart. Vance was in Washington, D.C., and later in New Haven doing research for a professor. Usha was in New York, working for a law firm. Vance wrote that she had fallen in love with the city. He had always wanted to move back to Ohio, but he told her he would go to California, Colorado, wherever she wanted.
That willingness to follow is worth noting from a man who has built his brand on loyalty to his roots. Usha Vance has said publicly that she and the vice president don't always see eye to eye on politics. The memoir excerpt suggests that dynamic, mutual respect between two strong-minded people, was baked in from the start.
"Communion" is Vance's second book. His first, "Hillbilly Elegy," was a bestselling 2016 memoir about growing up in Appalachian Ohio. That book became a cultural flashpoint and was adapted into a 2020 movie directed by Ron Howard, starring Amy Adams and Glenn Close. It launched Vance from obscurity into the national conversation about class, culture, and the American working class.
This new book appears to pick up a different thread, not poverty and dysfunction, but faith and family. Vance framed it explicitly around motherhood in his statement to USA Today.
"All moms − all families − have their own stories, with a mix of ups and downs. To all the moms reading this, I hope your stories have included more good days than bad − and I hope you have a wonderful Mother's Day!"
That's a warm sentiment, but it also fits a deliberate pattern. Vance has spent the past several years making family formation, marriage, children, rootedness, a centerpiece of his political identity. The memoir excerpt reinforces that message in the most personal terms available.
Whether Vance runs for the presidency in 2028 remains an open question. He has been building relationships in early states and shoring up his standing within the Republican Party. A book about faith, marriage, and the decision to build a family is the kind of foundation a candidate lays before asking voters to trust him with something bigger.
Or it's just a love story. Either way, it tells you what Vance wants you to know about what matters to him, and in politics, that's never an accident.
