Why JD Vance was 'obsessed' with wife Usha when they met – Exclusive memoir excerpt
Why JD Vance was 'obsessed' with wife Usha when they met – Exclusive memoir excerpt
Clare Mulroy, USA TODAY Sun, May 10, 2026 at 12:55 PM UTC
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Vice President JD Vance is gearing up to publish a new memoir, this time about rediscovering religion.
“Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith” (out June 16 from Harper) is Vance’s second book. His bestselling 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” chronicles his childhood plagued by abuse, alcoholism and poverty. It was the basis for the 2020 Ron Howard-directed movie starring Amy Adams and Glenn Close.
In "Communion," Vance reflects on his conversion to Catholicism after a Protestant upbringing and a stint as an atheist.
"A critical part of that journey was falling in love with a girl who would eventually become a mother four times over," Vance told USA TODAY in a statement.
He continued: "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!
Read an excerpt from ‘Communion’ JD Vance: VP on meeting wife Usha
Not long before I got to law school, one of my best friends, Mike, went through a particularly tough breakup with a girl. All the standard clichés applied as I did my best to soothe my buddy with a combination of good conversation and copious amounts of Natural Light. During his relationship, he had acknowledged that he and his girlfriend weren’t a particularly good match. He had complained that she was jealous. She had demanded too much of his time. Her parents had been intrusive. But all that faded away in the mists of heartache. Now she was perfect, beautiful, the love of his life. She had dumped him, and as I’ve noticed time after time with my buddies, the only thing worse than heartache is heartache with a bruised ego on top.
Mike and I were home in Middletown over Christmas, so I took him out to our favorite watering hole – Carol’s Speakeasy – to play darts and tell stories and drink his troubles away.
It’s fresh, but he’s in a pretty good place, I thought as we left the bar.
But as I drove him home, the sense of loss – well lubricated by alcohol – came flowing out of him.
There he was in my old Honda Civic (me sober, him not) bawling his eyes out about this girl. I gave him a hug, listened to him in his driveway for about an hour, and told him to just keep putting one foot in front of the other. I reminded him he hadn’t been all that crazy about her until she dumped him and that he was a good-looking guy with a lot of options.
“Plus,” I told him. “I’m single, and when we get back to Columbus, I can be your wingman. There are plenty of fish in the sea.”
“Yeah,” he replied half-heartedly. Columbus was nothing if not a target-rich environment for a couple of bachelors.
I hadn’t felt the same heartache in my own dating life. For a couple of years during and after college, I’d dated a girl named Mary. She was sweet, and she wanted the same things out of life that I did: a nice house, a decent job, and a couple of kids. My family got along with her fine. No relationship is perfect, but nothing seemed like a deal breaker. Still, I could never escape the feeling that, as much as I liked her, if she were to dump me the next day, I’d get over it quickly. I’d never react the way Mike had reacted to his breakup with Jessica.
“Dude, I don’t think I have that gene or something,” I told Mike.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“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?”
“Maybe she’s not the right girl,” he suggested.
“Maybe,” I said. “But maybe I’m just not that emotional.”
A few months after that conversation, I was still dating Mary – now long distance, from New Haven, Connecticut, where I was a couple of months into my first year of law school. I was walking late at night on an unusually cold and rainy fall day. New Haven is spooky in the fog, and the rain had emptied out the streets. And the whole time I was thinking about another student: Usha Bala Chilukuri.
Second lady Usha Vance and Vice President JD Vance arrive for a military mothers celebration in the East Room of the White House on May 6, 2026 in Washington, DC.
I called my buddy Mike, who asked about law school, the classmates, the vibe, and the girls.
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“Dude, I think I’m obsessed with this chick in my small group. It’s unhealthy.”
The small group, I explained, was the collection of sixteen students with whom I shared all of my first-year classes.
I told him all about her: That she was smarter than everyone. That her smile could light up a room. That she had the most amazing posture.
“She doesn’t even walk like normal people. Normal girls seem kind of unstable in high heels,” I told him. “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.”
“JD?” Mike interrupted. “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.”
He was right, of course. I don’t need to belabor the point. A consequence of my current job is that my relationship with the Second Lady has been written about, analyzed, researched, and dissected more than I ever thought possible. It is strange to read things about the person you love the most that you know are false. For example, a former classmate (and former acquaintance) told some major newspaper that I was initially attracted to Usha because of her “ambition.”
Usha and I found this laughable – that I would ever confide in this classmate, but more so that I was attracted to Usha’s ambition. There were many things that I thought were unusual about Usha when I first met her. One is that she was intensely competitive, but I saw this as more bizarre than attractive. She was incapable of jealousy, something I assumed came from a supreme inner confidence. But when I asked her – she was more capable than any person I had ever met – what she wanted to do, I was shocked at how uninterested she was in traditional markers of success.
“I just want interesting work,” she told me.
Her dream job was to run the Sesame Workshop because she loved kids and the idea of making educational programming that appealed to them. At Yale Law School, every person thinks they’re eventually going to run the world. You couldn’t throw a rock without hitting a person who thought they’d eventually become a Supreme Court Justice or US senator. But Usha, more capable than any of them, couldn’t have cared less about any of that. “There’s something a little jacked up about all of this,” I told Mike. “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.”
"Communion" by JD Vance comes out June 16.
I told Usha something similar: “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.”
That complete indifference to what other people wanted to do – or wanted her to do – was just another in a long list of magnetic personality traits.
I once described Usha as a combination of every genetic gift a person would want to have – beauty, intelligence, height. But there was something more: She was intense. I was drawn to her unlike I had ever been drawn to anyone.
I broke up with Mary, in part because of the long distance, but mostly because I couldn’t imagine settling for anyone else.
“I will marry this girl,” I told my friends. “Or I will be a lifelong bachelor.”
Everyone else was like a dim light bulb set against Usha’s radiance. My feelings for her overrode every instinct and everything I thought I knew about women. “Play hard to get” was something young men told one another about attracting the opposite sex. But instead, I told Usha before we ever dated that I was in love with her. “Don’t come on too strong” was another adage of dating I had learned from the world, but we had been together only a few weeks when I told her I wanted to marry her and would do whatever I needed to do to make that happen.
I had always wanted to move back home to Ohio, and she had fallen in love with New York. So I told her I’d move to New York with her, or California, or Colorado. I didn’t care, so long as she was there. I told her everything and I asked her about everything. Her life was the most interesting thing in the world. Politics, technology, business – these were professional interests, things I read about and wanted to work on. But Usha was the only one for whom I’d ever felt real passion.
Amazingly, it worked out. Usha and I began dating in law school, and during our first summer together romantically we were apart physically – me in Washington, DC, at first and then in New Haven, doing research for a professor, and she in New York working for a law firm. We had been together only a few months, and I felt so intensely toward her that she occupied my thoughts nearly every waking moment. This was normal, of course: Two young lovers caught in that early stage of romance, where everything is new and exciting and profound. But I remember thinking that no man had ever felt so strongly about a woman in the history of the world and that I had to hide at least some of my feelings lest I come on too strong. The fact that we spent most of that summer in separate cities – the absence – only compounded it all.
In hindsight, it’s a wonder I didn’t ruin it. I didn’t just come on too strong; I was a lousy boyfriend in many ways. My traumatic childhood had made me resentful and left me with awful conflict management skills. I would overreact or withdraw – fight or flight! – over minor transgressions. If Usha was my soulmate at Yale, I didn’t deserve her. But still she stuck around.
Contributing: Mary Walrath-Holdridge
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Exclusive excerpt of 'Communion' – JD Vance remembers falling for Usha
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