Giving Up is Unforgivable

Joyce Vance writes from a vantage point that most political memoirists pretend to have — but she actually earned. A former U.S. Attorney, she has spent her career in the live fire of the law: decisions with real victims, real perpetrators, real stakes. In Giving Up is Unforgivable, she is not selling optimism. She is insisting on duty.

This book could easily have been a self-mythologizing victory lap. It isn’t. Instead, Vance writes with prosecutorial clarity and almost startling humility. She is more interested in what institutions owe the public than what she is owed by history. The throughline is not partisan grievance, but a steady, almost old-fashioned belief in civic obligation — and in the idea that democracy fails only when its stewards become tired.

Vance mixes casework, lived experience, and a wide-angle view of America’s democratic backsliding. She isn’t alarmist — she’s frank. Her argument is that democratic erosion looks ordinary while it’s happening. Not jackboots; paperwork. Not riots; apathy. And her response is not a call to rage but a call to stay in the room — to fight boredom, cynicism, and despair.

The prose is plainspoken, sometimes almost too modest. Those expecting rhetorical fireworks will not find them. The power of this book isn’t in soaring lines — it’s in disciplined lucidity. Vance treats the reader as a grown-up who can handle the unvarnished mechanics of accountability.

In a culture that increasingly rewards exit — flouncing off social platforms, disengaging from the news, retreating into curated micro-realities — Vance asks the harder question: Who benefits when decent people disengage? She offers neither comfort nor nihilism. She offers responsibility.