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Before he was Vice President and a best-selling author, JD Vance says his life changed in an unexpected way during law school, when a quiet encounter turned into an all-consuming love story that reshaped everything he thought he knew about relationships, ambition, and himself.

A New Memoir Peels Back the Personal Side of JD Vance
Vice President JD Vance is preparing to release a new memoir focused on his spiritual journey and return to faith.

“Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith” is set for release June 16 from Harper and marks his second major book after the bestselling 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” which chronicled his difficult upbringing marked by abuse, alcoholism, and poverty. That book was later adapted into a 2020 Ron Howard film starring Amy Adams and Glenn Close.

In this new work, Vance reflects on his conversion to Catholicism after being raised in a Protestant household and later identifying 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!"

An Unexpected Turning Point at Yale Law School
A newly released excerpt shows how deeply personal experiences shaped his early adulthood, including his relationship with his future wife, Usha.

Not long before law school, Vance recalls a close friend, Mike, going through a painful breakup.

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 cliches 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."

The Moment Everything Shifted
Months later, while attending Yale Law School, Vance says everything changed when he met Usha Bala Chilukuri.

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.

I called my buddy Mike, who asked about law school, the classmates, the vibe, and the girls.

"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.

Love, Ambition, and a Life Rewritten
Vance reflects that his relationship with Usha has since been heavily analyzed due to his public life, but he disputes outside interpretations of how they met and what drew him in.

As their relationship developed at Yale Law School, he says he became fully consumed by her presence, her intelligence, and her independence from traditional ambition.

He ultimately ended his relationship with Mary, citing distance and a growing realization that he could not settle.

“I will marry this girl,” he told friends. “Or I will be a lifelong bachelor.”

What followed was an intense early romance that, by his own account, reshaped his entire understanding of love and attachment as he and Usha built a life together after law school.