PAPER GIRL: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America, by Beth Macy
Since she started writing books more than a decade ago, the journalist Beth Macy has tried to find glimmers of hope amid the wreckage of the American dream. In books like “Factory Man” and “Dopesick,” she chronicles how global offshoring and the opioid epidemic hollowed out rural life, while also seeking those hardy figures who fought back: the Virginia furniture maker who kept the local factory open; the grieving parents who sued a pharmaceutical company for peddling drugs to their children.
Now, Macy takes on the pressing subject of the country’s political divide by returning to her hometown, Urbana, Ohio. “Paper Girl” is a mix of memoir and reportage exploring the social ravages of industrial decline. “It is no longer unusual to drive through my hometown — once a Union stronghold and a proud stop on the Underground Railroad — and see Confederate flags,” she writes. “I’d also clocked growing tension over politics among my family members and some of my oldest, dearest friends, most of whom now hated ‘the media,’ even though they still loved me.”
Macy’s personal history provides an appealing prism, even as “Paper Girl” covers some familiar terrain. In the last 10 years or so, there’s been a steady stream of books about the predicament of America’s rural regions. Scholars like Arlie Russell Hochschild, Angus Deaton and Anne Case have traced the links between economic disruption, addiction, social isolation and political resentments. In “Demon Copperhead,” the novelist Barbara Kingsolver offered a fictionalized version of the opioid crisis. A few months before the 2016 election, JD Vance published “Hillbilly Elegy,” his memoir of a difficult childhood in Middletown, Ohio, which he presented as a lesson on the importance of personal responsibility.
Urbana, the county seat, is about an hour north of Middletown, and Vance’s name shows up a few times in “Paper Girl.” Macy, a self-described liberal, calls Vance a “hillbilly huckster” and calls out his lurid falsehoods on the 2024 campaign trail about pet-eating immigrants. But she also suggests that the Trump-Vance ticket was so successful in Urbana — winning the county with nearly 75 percent of the vote — because her hometown had grown receptive to hateful rhetoric. She is startled to learn that her ex-boyfriend Bill, formerly a journalist and NPR-listening Bernie Sanders supporter, helps run an anti-migrant Facebook group and has begun imbibing Russian propaganda.
The post Revisiting Her Hometown, a Journalist Finds Anger, Addiction and Despair appeared first on New York Times.
