Vice President JD Vance is set to publish a second memoir next month, and the first excerpts paint a portrait of a young man from Middletown, Ohio, who walked into Yale Law School carrying a lifetime of instability and walked out with a marriage that would anchor everything that came after.

"Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith," due out June 16 from Harper, traces Vance's conversion to Catholicism after what he describes as a Protestant upbringing followed by a stretch of atheism. But the excerpt released this week focuses on something more personal: the story of meeting Usha Bala Chilukuri.

The passage, published exclusively by USA TODAY, reads less like political memoir and more like a man looking back at the moment his life changed direction. In a statement to the paper, Vance tied the book's themes together plainly:

"A critical part of that journey was falling in love with a girl who would eventually become a mother four times over."

That girl was the woman now known as the Second Lady of the United States.

A small group, a big impression

The excerpt opens during Vance's first year at Yale Law School in New Haven, Connecticut. He describes being placed in a small group, sixteen students who shared all of his first-year classes. Usha Chilukuri was among them.

At the time, Vance was still in a long-distance relationship with a woman he identifies only as Mary, whom he had dated for a couple of years during and after college. But his attention kept drifting toward his classmate. Months into the school year, during a Christmas break back in Middletown, Vance confessed to his best friend Mike at a local spot called Carol's Speakeasy.

"Dude, I think I'm obsessed with this chick in my small group. It's unhealthy."

What followed was the kind of conversation two guys from a small Ohio town have over darts and drinks. Vance described Usha's walk, her composure, her laugh. The details are specific in the way only genuine infatuation produces.

"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, who was nursing his own breakup with a woman named Jessica, listened and then delivered a verdict Vance apparently needed to hear.

"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."

Ambition, humility, and the mismatch that mattered

What struck Vance about Usha wasn't just attraction. It was contrast. He describes a law school culture thick with ambition, students jockeying for clerkships, partnerships, political futures. Usha stood apart. When he asked about her plans, she told him simply: "I just want interesting work."

Her dream job, Vance writes, was to run the Sesame Workshop.

That gap between ability and ambition fascinated him. He told her 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."

The observation says as much about Vance's world as it does about Usha. He had come from a place where people scraped for every inch. Here was a woman with every credential who wanted something quieter. It clearly moved him. In the excerpt, he reflects on the broader pattern at Yale, the least impressive students chasing the biggest titles, while the most capable ones wanted families and decent work.

That observation has aged well. The media have spent years trying to manufacture drama around the Vance marriage, reading body language and projecting dysfunction. The memoir excerpt tells a different story, one of a man who saw something real and held on.

From law school to long distance

The relationship moved fast. Vance writes that he and Usha had been together "only a few weeks" when he told her he wanted to marry her. His declaration, as he recounts it, left no room for ambiguity:

"I will marry this girl. Or I will be a lifelong bachelor."

Their first summer together as a couple tested the conviction. Vance was in Washington, D.C., then back in New Haven doing research for a professor. Usha was working at a law firm in New York, a city she had fallen in love with. Vance, meanwhile, had always wanted to move back to Ohio.

He describes telling her he would follow her anywhere, California, Colorado, wherever. The tension between his roots and her horizons is a thread the full book will presumably develop further.

The biographical record fills in what the excerpt leaves out. Newsmax has reported that JD and Usha graduated from Yale Law in 2013, married in 2014, and that Usha went on to clerk for Brett Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts before working as a trial lawyer at Munger, Tolles & Olson. In "Hillbilly Elegy," Vance wrote that "in a place that always seemed a little foreign, Usha's presence made me feel at home."

He also acknowledged her steadying influence with characteristic bluntness: "Even at my best, I'm a delayed explosion, I can be defused, but only with skill and precision. It's not just that I've learned to control myself but that Usha has learned how to manage me."

The daughter of immigrants who became Second Lady

Usha Chilukuri Vance is the daughter of Indian immigrants. She was raised in San Diego, California, earned degrees from Yale and Cambridge, and built a legal career that most attorneys would envy. Breitbart noted her prominent clerkships and her work at one of the country's top law firms when JD Vance received the vice presidential nod.

None of that career ambition, notably, is what Vance highlights in the memoir excerpt. He writes about her laugh, her walk, her humility. The professional résumé is the backdrop. The foreground is character.

That framing matters in 2026, as Vance's national profile continues to grow. His courtship of Iowa Republicans and early 2028 positioning have made his personal life a subject of increasing public curiosity. Readers want to know who the man is, not just what he votes for.

A second book, a different register

"Communion" is Vance's second book. His first, "Hillbilly Elegy," became a bestseller in 2016 and was adapted into a 2020 film directed by Ron Howard and starring Amy Adams and Glenn Close. That book was a raw account of poverty, addiction, and family dysfunction in Appalachian Ohio.

The new memoir operates in a different register. Where "Hillbilly Elegy" catalogued damage, "Communion" appears to trace repair, through faith, through marriage, through fatherhood. The excerpt released this week is the love-story chapter, but the book's subtitle signals a broader arc: "Finding My Way Back to Faith."

Vance's statement to USA TODAY leaned into the Mother's Day timing of the excerpt's release, addressing mothers directly:

"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!"

The political class will parse "Communion" for 2028 signals. That's inevitable, given recent polling showing Vance dominating the GOP field. But the excerpt itself is not a policy document. It's a man writing about the woman who changed his life, and doing so with the kind of specificity that can't be faked.

There are open questions the excerpt doesn't answer. What year exactly did these events take place? Who is "Mike" beyond a first name? What major newspaper does Vance reference elsewhere in the passage? The full book, arriving June 16, will presumably fill those gaps.

What the excerpt does establish is a tone. Vance writes about Usha with the clarity of someone who knew early and never wavered. The political world has spent years trying to complicate that story. His family has been dragged into public controversies they never asked for. The memoir is Vance telling his own version, in his own words, on his own terms.

In an era when politicians hire consultants to manufacture authenticity, there's something disarming about a vice president who admits he once told his best friend over darts that his feelings for a classmate were "unhealthy." That's not a focus group answer. That's a man who got lucky and knows it.