Urbana, Ohio, is a small city of 11,000, where nearly three out of four voters went for Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election. The journalist Beth Macy, who in her previous books chronicled the widening fissures in American society by examining the opioid crisis and the aftereffects of globalization, grew up there. In Paper Girl, she returns to Urbana—a place beset by economic decline, dwindling public resources, failing schools, and the disappearance of local journalism. These descriptions might feel familiar, like an update of J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. Vance, as it turns out, grew up just an hour down the road.
But unlike Vance, who blamed much of his hometown’s misfortune on its residents, Macy approaches the Urbana of 2023 with an open mind. She wants to understand what happened. Her focus is less on the reason for the decline than on the question of why people—even close family members—stopped talking with one another. How is it that Americans with disagreements are unable even to find the language to converse? With that in mind, Macy seeks to do something seemingly simple but actually profound: talk with people she knows, even if they seem to live in a different reality, and try to find a common humanity.
She visits with family and old friends, some of whom share her view of the world and, more important, others who see things very differently. At one point, Macy is interviewing her sister Cookie, who believes the 2020 election was rigged, when Macy’s older child, who is gay, comes up. Cookie quotes a line from scripture: A man “shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.” Macy tells her she’s not invited to her son’s wedding. When members of Macy’s high-school graduating class try to put together a reunion, tensions between old classmates that grew during Trump’s first term bubble over, one organizer drops out after receiving a death threat, and “friendships built over sixty years dissolved,” Macy writes. “Some of my oldest friendships seemed on the brink of dissolving too.”
Macy doesn’t reserve her disappointment for those she disagrees with politically. One Christmas, her sister-in-law, a Yale-educated poet, grumbles about Macy’s siblings, all of whom voted for Trump. She tells Macy, “Your people don’t want my people to exist.” Reflecting on the accusation, Macy writes, “How could I not love the relatives who took care of my demented mother when I live seven hours away, including my brother-in-law John, who flings around the word ‘deplorable’ at me but also resets Mom’s TV every other day, or the sister who takes her to every doctor’s appointment?” She tells her sister-in-law, “My people don’t hate your people; they don’t even know your people.” In Paper Girl, Macy does what most opinion essays and social-media posts don’t even try to do: She gets out of her bubble.
In 2017, a couple of weeks after Trump’s first inauguration, I interviewed J. D. Vance at an event sponsored by the University of Chicago Institute of Politics. I have trouble reconciling the thoughtful person I encountered at the time with the vengeful, snarky incarnation of today. Back then, when Vance despaired over Trump’s hateful rhetoric, he talked about Americans’ “inability to cross ideological boundaries in our conversations.” He referred to the country’s “massive geographic segregation of opportunity” and noted that “it’s really hard to be compassionate with somebody you don’t actually know.” Macy actively conjures up that compassion as she tries to reacquaint herself with those she considers her people. As she notes, she doesn’t “want to write them off.” And she doesn’t want them to write her off, either.
One of Macy’s most resonant discoveries is the loneliness and isolation of so many in Urbana. The town’s residents are not only alienated from the rest of the country, they’re also disconnected from their own neighbors. She notes that midway through the school year, 27 percent of students in the district were considered “chronically absent” from one of the primary institutions where they might find community. In the past six years, Macy writes, the number of children homeschooled in Urbana has doubled. This was made possible, in large part, by a law passed by the Ohio state legislature in 2023 that gutted guidelines for homeschooling; home teachers are no longer required to submit curricula to the school district’s superintendent. The town’s school board also voted to allow LifeWise Academy, a religious program, to operate in Urbana’s schools. During one recent school year, LifeWise pulled 55 first and second graders out of the classroom to bus them to a nearby church for “Bible-based character instruction.” As the philosopher Kenneth Conklin, whom Macy quotes, has written, “The easiest way to break apart a society long-term without using violence is to establish separate educational systems.”
Moreover, the community has almost no reliable local sources of information. The city’s newspaper, the Urbana Daily Citizen, is now printed only twice a week and produced by a staff of two. A group of journalists created the Ohio Capital Journal, an online newspaper. But, as Macy writes, “no one, save my former Urbana newspaper editor, had even heard of it.” Without the glue of shared schooling or the sense of unity engendered by a common source of information, it’s no wonder that people pull away—or are pulled away—from one another.
At the center of Paper Girl is the moving story of a young man, Silas James, Macy’s present-day doppelgänger. When Macy was growing up, her mother worked in a factory and her dad was known as the town drunk. Her family struggled financially, and so in seventh grade she began delivering the newspaper to her neighbors to make extra money (her customers called her “paper girl”). Like Macy, Silas is smart and ambitious, from a hardscrabble family. But Macy is struck by how much harder life is for Silas than it was for her, and not just because he’s transgender. While he’s in high school, Silas’s father, who had multiple health conditions, dies of a methadone overdose, and his mom is jailed on drug charges. Homeless, Silas is forced to couch surf with friends. “This was a reality I could not have conceived of in Urbana forty years before, when I knew of no homeless people and certainly no one who’d lost a parent to overdose,” Macy writes. Yet Silas’s story also underscores the notion that if you get to know someone up close, you’re more likely to challenge your preconceptions. A decade earlier, the town had canceled its Memorial Day parade because it didn’t want to let an LGBTQ float participate. Yet, when Silas is about to graduate from eighth grade and tells the principal that he refuses to wear a dress to the ceremony, the principal, who has come to know Silas, responds, “I’m not going to make you.” The parents of Silas’s boyfriend, the reader learns, leave their church because of its rejection of homosexuality, and join a more open-minded congregation.
Macy’s book feels unique in part because she knows her interviewees—she has deep, long-standing ties to many of them, and you sense her contending with that fact. In a time when people are cutting off family members and friends, Macy is pleading with readers to talk and listen, and to hold on to those relationships as best they can. But even she would admit it’s not easy. While in Urbana, she reconnects with an old boyfriend who, in his 20s, had been a politically liberal free spirit. Now, disillusioned with the Democratic Party and much of the media, he is, Macy writes, an “ardent fan of Vladimir Putin” who is “intrigued” by QAnon. Macy concedes that there are “chunks of truth” in some of his grievances. For instance, she writes, he condemned President Barack Obama for breaking his promise to change bankruptcy laws in order to help struggling homeowners during the 2008 recession, even as he bailed out big banks and auto manufacturers. Nonetheless, her ex’s rage overpowers everything else. “You guys continue to lie to people, but fewer people are being fooled by your wordplay bullshit every day … You can dupe Americans, but the rest of the world sees you for what you are,” he emails her at one point. “You people are fucking liars. I can’t be nice about it no more …” Macy backs off.
Many of Macy’s interactions have the quality of alternately pushing and easing up—expressing herself honestly and then knowing when to cool off. Human connection, never mind persuasion, is rarely a matter of a single conversation, but rather the work of months or years, maybe a lifetime. I’m left thinking about the words of James Baldwin that Macy cites: “The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way a person looks or people look at reality, then you can change it.”
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