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Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America
Goodreads Choice Award
Nominee for Readers' Favorite Memoir (2025)"There couldn’t be a timelier book . . . searingly poignant, essential . . . Macy follows closely in the footsteps of . . . Barbara Ehrenreich and Tracy Kidder, combining memoir with reportage, a raft of sobering statistics and, most uniquely in our era, a willingness to engage in uncomfortable conversations." —
The Washington Post
From one of our most acclaimed chroniclers of the forces eroding America’s social fabric, her most personal and powerful a reckoning with the changes that have rocked her own beloved small Ohio hometown
Urbana, Ohio, was not a utopia when Beth Macy grew up there in the ’70s and ’80s—certainly not for her family. Her dad was known as the town drunk, which hurt, as did their poverty. But Urbana had a healthy economy and thriving schools, and Macy had middle-class schoolmates whose families became her role models. Though she left for college on a Pell Grant and then a faraway career in journalism, she still clung gratefully to the place that had helped raise her.
But as Macy’s mother’s health declined in 2020, she couldn’t shake the feeling that her town had dramatically hardened. Macy had grown up as the paper girl, delivering the local newspaper, which was the community’s civic glue. Now she found scant local news and precious little civic glue. Yes, much of the work that once supported the middle class had gone away, but that didn’t begin to cover the forces turning Urbana into a poorer and angrier place. Absenteeism soared in the schools and in the workplace as a mental health crisis gripped the small city. Some of her old friends now embraced conspiracies. In nearby Springfield, Macy watched as her ex-boyfriend—once the most liberal person she knew—became a lead voice of opposition against the Haitian immigrants, parroting false talking points throughout the 2024 presidential campaign.
This was not an assignment Beth Macy had ever imagined taking on, but after her mother’s death, she decided to figure out what happened to Urbana in the 40 years since she’d left. The result is an astonishing book that, by taking us into the heart of one place, brings into focus our most urgent set of national issues.
Paper Girl is a gift of courage, empathy, and insight. Beth Macy has turned to face the darkness in her family and community, people she loves wholeheartedly, even the ones she sometimes struggles to like. And in facing the truth—in person, with respect—she has found sparks of human dignity that she has used to light a signal fire of warning but also of hope.
From one of our most acclaimed chroniclers of the forces eroding America’s social fabric, her most personal and powerful a reckoning with the changes that have rocked her own beloved small Ohio hometown
Urbana, Ohio, was not a utopia when Beth Macy grew up there in the ’70s and ’80s—certainly not for her family. Her dad was known as the town drunk, which hurt, as did their poverty. But Urbana had a healthy economy and thriving schools, and Macy had middle-class schoolmates whose families became her role models. Though she left for college on a Pell Grant and then a faraway career in journalism, she still clung gratefully to the place that had helped raise her.
But as Macy’s mother’s health declined in 2020, she couldn’t shake the feeling that her town had dramatically hardened. Macy had grown up as the paper girl, delivering the local newspaper, which was the community’s civic glue. Now she found scant local news and precious little civic glue. Yes, much of the work that once supported the middle class had gone away, but that didn’t begin to cover the forces turning Urbana into a poorer and angrier place. Absenteeism soared in the schools and in the workplace as a mental health crisis gripped the small city. Some of her old friends now embraced conspiracies. In nearby Springfield, Macy watched as her ex-boyfriend—once the most liberal person she knew—became a lead voice of opposition against the Haitian immigrants, parroting false talking points throughout the 2024 presidential campaign.
This was not an assignment Beth Macy had ever imagined taking on, but after her mother’s death, she decided to figure out what happened to Urbana in the 40 years since she’d left. The result is an astonishing book that, by taking us into the heart of one place, brings into focus our most urgent set of national issues.
Paper Girl is a gift of courage, empathy, and insight. Beth Macy has turned to face the darkness in her family and community, people she loves wholeheartedly, even the ones she sometimes struggles to like. And in facing the truth—in person, with respect—she has found sparks of human dignity that she has used to light a signal fire of warning but also of hope.
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First published October 7, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 338 reviews
June 18, 2025
ARC for review. To be published October 7, 2025.
5 stars
This book wasn't exactly what I was expecting and, for my own sanity I need to take a break from reading books involving politics as they stand today in America, but, wow, did I love this and I think I want to go to Roanoke and stalk Beth Macy until she realizes that we are fated to be best friends.
For some reason I thought this was a memoir (and there is some memoir to it) but it’s really an incredibly compelling look at the differences in small town America (here, Ohio) between Macy’s youth and today, and a wider view at how divided we are as a nation. However, this time it’s not written by Ivy League professors or pundits, but is written by a woman who is re-engaging with some of the people she knows best, her friends and neighbors from her hometown. For example, Macy’s ex-boyfriend, who was born once a liberal hippie and is now a Q-Anonymous spouting conspiracy theorist. Town leaders who refuse to support a youth center. Educators who are trying, desperately to stop the town’s plummeting graduation and truancy rates, but receiving little support from many parents.
This was fascinating, and Macy writes like you are having a conversation with a good friend. I’ve been halfway meaning to read, but keep putting off her DOPESICK, because sometimes I feel that, living where I do, I’ve been overwhelmed with information on the opioid crisis, but I’ll definitely be getting to it soon. I absolutely loved this, and highly recommend it.
5 stars
This book wasn't exactly what I was expecting and, for my own sanity I need to take a break from reading books involving politics as they stand today in America, but, wow, did I love this and I think I want to go to Roanoke and stalk Beth Macy until she realizes that we are fated to be best friends.
For some reason I thought this was a memoir (and there is some memoir to it) but it’s really an incredibly compelling look at the differences in small town America (here, Ohio) between Macy’s youth and today, and a wider view at how divided we are as a nation. However, this time it’s not written by Ivy League professors or pundits, but is written by a woman who is re-engaging with some of the people she knows best, her friends and neighbors from her hometown. For example, Macy’s ex-boyfriend, who was born once a liberal hippie and is now a Q-Anonymous spouting conspiracy theorist. Town leaders who refuse to support a youth center. Educators who are trying, desperately to stop the town’s plummeting graduation and truancy rates, but receiving little support from many parents.
This was fascinating, and Macy writes like you are having a conversation with a good friend. I’ve been halfway meaning to read, but keep putting off her DOPESICK, because sometimes I feel that, living where I do, I’ve been overwhelmed with information on the opioid crisis, but I’ll definitely be getting to it soon. I absolutely loved this, and highly recommend it.
October 31, 2025
A book whose premise and content seem wildly outdated already, treading familiar and depressing territory and saying nothing new but adding to an already lengthy canon of non-fiction for self-flagellating progressives (currently under real threat of state repression and violence by a second Trump administration consolidating more and more power daily) who are convinced they are being abused because they deserve it because it is easier than accepting that their opponents hate them.
Macy’s juxtaposition of soft-focused entreaties to understand and contextualize the political and social anxieties of her neighbors and family with what they are actually espousing (homophobia, racism, and transphobia so violent and heated it borders on the genocidal) becomes increasingly jarring as the book progresses. Reading the book, you would be forgiven for assuming that these hateful speech acts are nothing but impotent cries for attention from a disaffected underclass that has been left behind by snobby elites, not state policy being enacted and echoed by the most powerful people in the United States. Republicans and Democrats alike hate to acknowledge that the hatefulness and prejudice of the right is actually connected to real power systems and structures that do actual harm. The right-wing base are treated like children with no real agency, intelligence, motives, or responsibility of their own, disconnected from the consequences of the power systems they prop up and held to the lowest possible moral standards imaginable, like going to each other’s weddings and shoveling each other’s driveways, actual examples from this book. If that’s not enough, Macy herself make this explicitly clear in the last sentence of her book when she states “I don’t blame them”. Shocker.
If there is anything I've learned as an American it is that public opinion can be molded and shifted and it is attracted to power. I genuinely believe that treating the support of Trump -- his crudeness, his malice, his incuriousity, his racism, his love for authoratarians and authoritarianism -- as a moral failure would shift public opinion. That we continue to concede ground, that we have accepted the truism that liberals just need to be nicer -- as if our civil liberties and rights weren't under constant assault-- and that that is still the dominant narrative in 2025 is utterly depressing. It is hard to read this type of book, written now, and released in 2025 as anything other than self-congratulatory pablum. It would be one thing if Macy offered any suggestion regarding how to recover our eroded civil liberties, she makes half-hearted gestures to education policy and public media, but ends up retreating, always, into empty moral platitudes about trying to listen to each other. As someone who has had a similar family life to Macy I don't mean to sound harsh when I say that journalists trying to work out their own moral confusion about still loving their family members despite their hateful prejudices should work it out in therapy, not their books. I could forgive it 2017, in 2025 there's no excuse.
Ultimately I’m left wondering, who is this book for? My guess it’s not for its subjects, who treat the author with distrust, contempt, and often insult her career and writing. This book, like all books that cover similar ground, is meant for well-meaning progressives, but the persuasiveness of its central premise has weakened so considerably it now just feels insulting. Maybe this is a generational divide, but half of my life has been swallowed up by Trump administrations and politicians in power that do nothing but denigrate the places I’ve lived in and the communities and the political priorities I hold most dear. The current president of the United States has spent ten years of political and public life saying the following about my specific city and this is just what I can remember off of the top of my head(just mine!):
“Democrats want to turn you into a refugee camp.”
“Are you having a good time with your refugees”
“Cesspit”
“Hellhole”
“Crime-ridden”
After our state senate leader was assassinated in June by a Christian nationalist with a hit-list of Democratic politicians in his car, Trump mocked our governor and a sitting senator mocked her death on his X account. She was specifically left off a list of victims of political violence read out during Trump’s address from the White House after Charlie Kirk was murdered, and just last week the DOJ blamed their deaths on “left-wing violence”
Trump has said about Democrats “I hate them” And LAST WEEK sat on a round-table with a man who published a hateful screed of a book that called leftists and progressives “unhumans”, a book whose forward was written by the sitting vice president, JD Vance.
Where is the book entreating empathy for the city-dwellers who have seen our neighborhoods overrun by masked federal agents in unmarked cars dragging our neighbors crying and screaming from their houses and beds? Where the book demanding empathy for our cities under threat from occupation of our own country’s standing army? Where the book asking for understanding of the young women of my generation socially alienated by our loss of legal protection under the law and a revanchist social movement trying to undo the political gains of the 20th and early 21st century, spearheaded by abusers and rapists in the highest seats of power?
There are poor people in cities, drug addicts in cities, failing schools in cities, even blue ones. The stories we tell ourselves do matter. Is there anything more inert in 2025 than the idea that not enough empathy flows from the margins to the center? I beg us all to have more self-respect.
Macy’s juxtaposition of soft-focused entreaties to understand and contextualize the political and social anxieties of her neighbors and family with what they are actually espousing (homophobia, racism, and transphobia so violent and heated it borders on the genocidal) becomes increasingly jarring as the book progresses. Reading the book, you would be forgiven for assuming that these hateful speech acts are nothing but impotent cries for attention from a disaffected underclass that has been left behind by snobby elites, not state policy being enacted and echoed by the most powerful people in the United States. Republicans and Democrats alike hate to acknowledge that the hatefulness and prejudice of the right is actually connected to real power systems and structures that do actual harm. The right-wing base are treated like children with no real agency, intelligence, motives, or responsibility of their own, disconnected from the consequences of the power systems they prop up and held to the lowest possible moral standards imaginable, like going to each other’s weddings and shoveling each other’s driveways, actual examples from this book. If that’s not enough, Macy herself make this explicitly clear in the last sentence of her book when she states “I don’t blame them”. Shocker.
If there is anything I've learned as an American it is that public opinion can be molded and shifted and it is attracted to power. I genuinely believe that treating the support of Trump -- his crudeness, his malice, his incuriousity, his racism, his love for authoratarians and authoritarianism -- as a moral failure would shift public opinion. That we continue to concede ground, that we have accepted the truism that liberals just need to be nicer -- as if our civil liberties and rights weren't under constant assault-- and that that is still the dominant narrative in 2025 is utterly depressing. It is hard to read this type of book, written now, and released in 2025 as anything other than self-congratulatory pablum. It would be one thing if Macy offered any suggestion regarding how to recover our eroded civil liberties, she makes half-hearted gestures to education policy and public media, but ends up retreating, always, into empty moral platitudes about trying to listen to each other. As someone who has had a similar family life to Macy I don't mean to sound harsh when I say that journalists trying to work out their own moral confusion about still loving their family members despite their hateful prejudices should work it out in therapy, not their books. I could forgive it 2017, in 2025 there's no excuse.
Ultimately I’m left wondering, who is this book for? My guess it’s not for its subjects, who treat the author with distrust, contempt, and often insult her career and writing. This book, like all books that cover similar ground, is meant for well-meaning progressives, but the persuasiveness of its central premise has weakened so considerably it now just feels insulting. Maybe this is a generational divide, but half of my life has been swallowed up by Trump administrations and politicians in power that do nothing but denigrate the places I’ve lived in and the communities and the political priorities I hold most dear. The current president of the United States has spent ten years of political and public life saying the following about my specific city and this is just what I can remember off of the top of my head(just mine!):
“Democrats want to turn you into a refugee camp.”
“Are you having a good time with your refugees”
“Cesspit”
“Hellhole”
“Crime-ridden”
After our state senate leader was assassinated in June by a Christian nationalist with a hit-list of Democratic politicians in his car, Trump mocked our governor and a sitting senator mocked her death on his X account. She was specifically left off a list of victims of political violence read out during Trump’s address from the White House after Charlie Kirk was murdered, and just last week the DOJ blamed their deaths on “left-wing violence”
Trump has said about Democrats “I hate them” And LAST WEEK sat on a round-table with a man who published a hateful screed of a book that called leftists and progressives “unhumans”, a book whose forward was written by the sitting vice president, JD Vance.
Where is the book entreating empathy for the city-dwellers who have seen our neighborhoods overrun by masked federal agents in unmarked cars dragging our neighbors crying and screaming from their houses and beds? Where the book demanding empathy for our cities under threat from occupation of our own country’s standing army? Where the book asking for understanding of the young women of my generation socially alienated by our loss of legal protection under the law and a revanchist social movement trying to undo the political gains of the 20th and early 21st century, spearheaded by abusers and rapists in the highest seats of power?
There are poor people in cities, drug addicts in cities, failing schools in cities, even blue ones. The stories we tell ourselves do matter. Is there anything more inert in 2025 than the idea that not enough empathy flows from the margins to the center? I beg us all to have more self-respect.
October 27, 2025
The author grew up in the town where I live. She grew up poor and admits to be the child of the town drunk. She was able to leave town for college with the help of a Pell Grant about 40 years ago. This book is a cross between a memoir about her family (2 sisters and 1 brother) who remain in the area and a look at how the city has changed with the loss of well paying factory jobs and the rhetoric of the presidential administration that incensed Macy in many ways especially the "They're eating the dogs. They're eating the cats." of the next town (9 miles) south.
Xenophobia and homophobia are as ubiquitous as the Confederate flags hanging from the porches of houses in the town with a Union soldier's statue at the center of town.
There was one story which gave enough of a description of an unnamed woman who yelled at another, "And you call yourself a Christian?" that gave me pause because that was exactly what I wanted to ask of her (the yeller) after the way she had treated my husband.
The book has stirred my sense of civics that I will probably contact the youth center to see how I can help.
This has to be the #1 book to infuriate me about how we treat one another. I learned a lot about my town.
Xenophobia and homophobia are as ubiquitous as the Confederate flags hanging from the porches of houses in the town with a Union soldier's statue at the center of town.
There was one story which gave enough of a description of an unnamed woman who yelled at another, "And you call yourself a Christian?" that gave me pause because that was exactly what I wanted to ask of her (the yeller) after the way she had treated my husband.
The book has stirred my sense of civics that I will probably contact the youth center to see how I can help.
This has to be the #1 book to infuriate me about how we treat one another. I learned a lot about my town.
November 29, 2025
⭐️ ⭐️
I desperately want to understand the cultural divide, no, gulf that has developed in our country. I want to understand it so that I can make my tiny imprint on figuring out how to somehow bridge it. Easier said than done I know, but something must change, and that change must begin within each and every one of us.
By reading this book, I was hoping to gain a deeper insight into the origins of these emerging patterns to gain some sort of empathetic view towards them, but unfortunately I learned nothing I didn’t already know. It covered no new ground, was completely scattered, and repetitive to the point of exhaustion.
Here I stand, still longing for understanding and seeking solutions.
I desperately want to understand the cultural divide, no, gulf that has developed in our country. I want to understand it so that I can make my tiny imprint on figuring out how to somehow bridge it. Easier said than done I know, but something must change, and that change must begin within each and every one of us.
By reading this book, I was hoping to gain a deeper insight into the origins of these emerging patterns to gain some sort of empathetic view towards them, but unfortunately I learned nothing I didn’t already know. It covered no new ground, was completely scattered, and repetitive to the point of exhaustion.
Here I stand, still longing for understanding and seeking solutions.
December 18, 2025
‘Paper Girl’ by Beth Macy answers quite a few of my questions. Like Macy, in my immediate family I am the only one who is a liberal and the only one of my generation who graduated with a Bachelors from a regular accredited college (one relative started attending a regular college, but then transferred to one which was more evangelical). Like Macy, I have become estranged from many in my family. Like Macy, I had family members unfriend me because I posted “liberal shit”. Like Macy, these were the family members who only watch Fox News and listen to extreme right-wing White Supremacist podcasts or small-church pastors. Like Macy, I wondered how as young adults, somewhat conservative relatives whom I knew slept with married and unmarried people, used and sold drugs, and raised hell when drunk or high, now thought liberal politics was another word for immoral values instead of uplifting folks from poverty. At the same time these relatives hate non-White immigrants, have unfriended gay siblings, and refuse to believe near relatives had been sexually abused as children while totally believing the Democratic Party is operating a secret brothel of little kids chained to a basement wall. And sadly, many young relatives don’t bother to vote “because politics doesn’t matter.”
I wonder what non-voting or MAGA people who depend on SNAP benefits, or who’ve lost their low-cost medical insurance, think now? Or those Republicans with lgbtq relatives in the military or working for a federal government agency, or those who need hormone treatment for gender transitions, or those who shop for foods that are imported from other countries, think now? Or who thought we’d pull out of other people’s wars by now? Or those communities who are STILL waiting for FEMA money after a hurricane, tornado, or massive mud slide - what are they feeling? Or those who thought being called a criminal didn’t apply to a person, whether relative or child, who immigrated illegally?
The author, Beth Macy, decided to move back to her hometown, Urbana, Ohio, for a couple of years in order to reestablish herself in her childhood community. Urbana is a Republican-voting town. She wanted to understand why. To do so, she interviewed not only members of her family and high-school friends, but town politicians and teachers, businessmen and librarians.
I have copied the book blurb:
”An Instant National Bestseller!
"There couldn’t be a timelier book . . . searingly poignant, essential . . . Macy follows closely in the footsteps of . . . Barbara Ehrenreich and Tracy Kidder, combining memoir with reportage, a raft of sobering statistics and, most uniquely in our era, a willingness to engage in uncomfortable conversations." —The Washington Post
From one of our most acclaimed chroniclers of the forces eroding America’s social fabric, her most personal and powerful a reckoning with the changes that have rocked her own beloved small Ohio hometown
Urbana, Ohio, was not a utopia when Beth Macy grew up there in the ’70s and ’80s—certainly not for her family. Her dad was known as the town drunk, which hurt, as did their poverty. But Urbana had a healthy economy and thriving schools, and Macy had middle-class schoolmates whose families became her role models. Though she left for college on a Pell Grant and then a faraway career in journalism, she still clung gratefully to the place that had helped raise her.
But as Macy’s mother’s health declined in 2020, she couldn’t shake the feeling that her town had dramatically hardened. Macy had grown up as the paper girl, delivering the local newspaper, which was the community’s civic glue. Now she found scant local news and precious little civic glue. Yes, much of the work that once supported the middle class had gone away, but that didn’t begin to cover the forces turning Urbana into a poorer and angrier place. Absenteeism soared in the schools and in the workplace as a mental health crisis gripped the small city. Some of her old friends now embraced conspiracies. In nearby Springfield, Macy watched as her ex-boyfriend—once the most liberal person she knew—became a lead voice of opposition against the Haitian immigrants, parroting false talking points throughout the 2024 presidential campaign.
This was not an assignment Beth Macy had ever imagined taking on, but after her mother’s death, she decided to figure out what happened to Urbana in the forty years since she’d left. The result is an astonishing book that, by taking us into the heart of one place, brings into focus our most urgent set of national issues.
Paper Girl is a gift of courage, empathy, and insight. Beth Macy has turned to face the darkness in her family and community, people she loves wholeheartedly, even the ones she sometimes struggles to like. And in facing the truth—in person, with respect—she has found sparks of human dignity that she has used to light a signal fire of warning but also of hope.”
The book has an extensive Note and Index section. There are many photos.
My personal comments: There exists a social cycle in many many American neighborhoods which is a vicious one, and really, its a spiral not a cycle. Parents can’t get a good-paying job and/or find a way to stop abusing drugs and alcohol, so they then abuse or neglect their almost always too many children from unstable revolving-door relationships, which leads to their kids growing up scared from misdirected rage-based violence. The children are mostly unsupported by consistent adult wisdom and affection, and what they do get is usually from mom only. Because of the home drama, children are unable to attend school regularly, which causes learning issues. They then often end up getting pregnant and/or dropping out of school due to mental illnesses like depression. Poorly parented teens often have their own kids which they don’t (or don’t know how to) take care of or educate properly not having had a proper education or upbringing themselves. The spiral of dysfunction grows ever bigger like rocks dropped into a pond.
My childhood in an urban neighborhood had lots of these kinds of piss-poor parents with low-paying or too hard non-union jobs, or they were single moms on welfare, with alcohol problems even if they were not alcoholics (usually the man of the house drank too much every night, but it was not always only the man drinking himself into a rage in the house) in every household. Four kids to a house was the average which usually was four kids too many. Families were primarily post- ex-WWII ex-farmers who couldn’t afford to raise any children, really, many people having dropped out of middle school. Not kidding. But you could count on the having of tons of beer and cigarettes in every house. No books except maybe a bible, despite that there were a lot of libraries and used books being sold by local Salvation Army and other thrift stores.
However, we baby boomer children of these wretched ignorant and impoverished parents had access to a lot of government programs initiated by President Johnson and Congress. If not for government programs, many baby boomers would never have had the opportunity to attend college on low-cost loans, following the example of awarding GI grants to returning military men from fighting in WWII. There was subsidized child care, free lunch programs for poor school children, mental health and regular health support systems created (free walk-in clinics), low-cost bus and train transportation. The public schools were given things like playgrounds, school nurses, libraries, music instruments, money for electives such as music and art classes, even public swimming pools were built near high schools and for the local communities. Working-class blue-collar men had the opportunity to get their GED’s through their places of employment, because employers agreed to participate in government supported education programs to men who had dropped out of high school to go to war or to the cities to work in war-related factories. Businesses were given tax credits if they offered free or low-cost medical insurance for their employees. The American government built roads, bridges, and power plants such as dams. Congress passed laws giving women access to the same rights as men, promoting programs to change public opinion on women as being small-brained cows to be encouraged to breed and clean toilets only.
I was there, folks. I was born in the 1950’s to shithole parents. I benefited from President Johnson’s efforts to uplift the poor and poorly educated.
Politicians could save these impoverished folks, today, now, and stop the spiral. Right? America has the resources, full stop. But except for a few decades here and there in the past, like the mid-1960’s/1970’s, politicians don’t help the poor or lower classes much in America. Unrestrained capitalism serves to help the rich get richer, and today the Republican Party is all about unrestrained capitalism. The Democrats help the poor more, but because of a strange toothlessness and a lack of will, supposedly due to lack of consensus, a reluctance to make waves and a need to get re-elected by being funded by wealthy people for campaign ads, Democrats don’t help the lower classes much except here and there, for a quarter or two of temporary financial support - but no quality continuing supportive training/education/medical care/community planning/infrastructure building which is necessary to change social ills.
In order to get elected, members of both American parties today kowtow to Big Business and billionaires and trillionaires who mostly pay for the politicians’ political campaigns, expecting to get in return the passage of congressional bills which support their not having to pay any taxes, hopefully forever, by cutting all programs that support the poor and lower classes. Free libraries are closing, government grants and low-cost loans for education are gone, a well-rounded educational curriculum at a university is being dismantled with access restricted to a select elite, support for free or low-cost child care is gone, government aid for new or damaged infrastructure is gone, access to free food for the poor is disappearing, low-cost access to medical care is going. Low-cost housing is gone. Lip support is increasing in a major push to all Americans to become a religious evangelical Christian, with actual laws being passed, state by state, enforcing evangelical Christianity rules and rituals on everyone regardless of previous beliefs. Evangelical Christianity insists women become slaves to men, stayinginside their homes, forgetting about education, but to stick to their role of being available for sex on demand, constant pregnancy, and raising children (evangelicals insist their God demands this arrangement for the lives of women as being best for females).
Today, we have an upper class elite which wants to replace those American bits of democratic and constitutional rights, especially those rules for freedom of religion, separation of church and state, a three-government-branches republic democracy, and being free of any religious policing of harmless social choices, which America had in place before President Trump was elected, with a government that will be a hardcore Christian theological dictatorship of pure racially White men and enslaved housebound women. Wealthy White-supremacist men, with the help of evangelical cults, hold the reins of power currently. They have successfully packed the U.S. Supreme Court with White evangelical supremacists and silenced the U.S Congress of strong voices speaking up to power. Voters who voted for these politicians selected by White supremacist trillionaires, hoping to gain economically in their private lives, have not yet seen any gains. In fact, only the incredibly wealthy have made economic gains. Huge surprise, right?
The modern rounds of wash/rinse/repeat of undemocratic ways of running America started with President Reagan’s Republican Party administration, btw. But the conservatives couldn’t make the cuts to helpful programs for the poor stick because in the next election, when Democrats usually were elected, some of the programs for the poor and programs for the good of the entire country, like infrastructure building and support for school lunches and preschool, were reinstated to some degree by the Democratic Party. However, the free clinics for psychiatric and medical care for the poor have never made a comeback since Reagan killed that support program.
Yes, Reagan started the dismantling of government support for the poor, getting rid of programs which helped them climb out of poverty into the middle class, to become educated by getting their GED’s free if they had dropped out for awhile, and having programs which helped kids graduate from high school with a quality education that included civics, music, sports and art. Reagan had advised prayer to fix things instead of government programs, much like what Republicans are telling their constituents today, as well.
In every theocratic empire in the world, prayers has not, or ever, worked though, except to enrich TV/media preachers and dictators, and scare impoverished citizens from thinking of any acts of fighting back because of the possibility of hellfire upon death as well as the certainty of public cancel culture and horrific punishments while living.
But clearly, the American wealthy were sick of the constant dismantling of the capitalism empire that they wanted. Then they got the right President, and the liberal judges on the Supreme Court were replaced by religious right-wing Christian evangelists, and in having already crippled many of the helpful programs which helped the poor understand the world through education in the Midwest and the South through Republican Party gerrymandering and cutting of programs to help the poor, and with the help of religious/White Supremacist radio talk shows which spew disinformation to people, the trillionaires got into power. The Republican Party even published a policy document outlining their plans that their supporters didn’t read, of course. I suppose when the Republicans still won elections after cutting money from their budgets that helped military veterans and poor children, even when they are always saying they support the vets and children only in speeches and not actually in life, they felt they could do anything, having sufficiently dumbed down their base. NAFTA gave Republicans the final push over the finish line of capturing a confused impoverished class of poorly educated workers. And opioid addiction was a godsend to wealthy Republicans who had money in Big Pharma stock. Ironically, it was southern Democrat President Clinton and a Republican Congress which brought NAFTA into being, a unified effort of wiping out union high-paying American jobs that did not require a high school degree…
Theological dictatorships are not good for common people, gentler reader, especially women.
The fall of the Roman Republic started like this….
I wonder what non-voting or MAGA people who depend on SNAP benefits, or who’ve lost their low-cost medical insurance, think now? Or those Republicans with lgbtq relatives in the military or working for a federal government agency, or those who need hormone treatment for gender transitions, or those who shop for foods that are imported from other countries, think now? Or who thought we’d pull out of other people’s wars by now? Or those communities who are STILL waiting for FEMA money after a hurricane, tornado, or massive mud slide - what are they feeling? Or those who thought being called a criminal didn’t apply to a person, whether relative or child, who immigrated illegally?
The author, Beth Macy, decided to move back to her hometown, Urbana, Ohio, for a couple of years in order to reestablish herself in her childhood community. Urbana is a Republican-voting town. She wanted to understand why. To do so, she interviewed not only members of her family and high-school friends, but town politicians and teachers, businessmen and librarians.
I have copied the book blurb:
”An Instant National Bestseller!
"There couldn’t be a timelier book . . . searingly poignant, essential . . . Macy follows closely in the footsteps of . . . Barbara Ehrenreich and Tracy Kidder, combining memoir with reportage, a raft of sobering statistics and, most uniquely in our era, a willingness to engage in uncomfortable conversations." —The Washington Post
From one of our most acclaimed chroniclers of the forces eroding America’s social fabric, her most personal and powerful a reckoning with the changes that have rocked her own beloved small Ohio hometown
Urbana, Ohio, was not a utopia when Beth Macy grew up there in the ’70s and ’80s—certainly not for her family. Her dad was known as the town drunk, which hurt, as did their poverty. But Urbana had a healthy economy and thriving schools, and Macy had middle-class schoolmates whose families became her role models. Though she left for college on a Pell Grant and then a faraway career in journalism, she still clung gratefully to the place that had helped raise her.
But as Macy’s mother’s health declined in 2020, she couldn’t shake the feeling that her town had dramatically hardened. Macy had grown up as the paper girl, delivering the local newspaper, which was the community’s civic glue. Now she found scant local news and precious little civic glue. Yes, much of the work that once supported the middle class had gone away, but that didn’t begin to cover the forces turning Urbana into a poorer and angrier place. Absenteeism soared in the schools and in the workplace as a mental health crisis gripped the small city. Some of her old friends now embraced conspiracies. In nearby Springfield, Macy watched as her ex-boyfriend—once the most liberal person she knew—became a lead voice of opposition against the Haitian immigrants, parroting false talking points throughout the 2024 presidential campaign.
This was not an assignment Beth Macy had ever imagined taking on, but after her mother’s death, she decided to figure out what happened to Urbana in the forty years since she’d left. The result is an astonishing book that, by taking us into the heart of one place, brings into focus our most urgent set of national issues.
Paper Girl is a gift of courage, empathy, and insight. Beth Macy has turned to face the darkness in her family and community, people she loves wholeheartedly, even the ones she sometimes struggles to like. And in facing the truth—in person, with respect—she has found sparks of human dignity that she has used to light a signal fire of warning but also of hope.”
The book has an extensive Note and Index section. There are many photos.
My personal comments: There exists a social cycle in many many American neighborhoods which is a vicious one, and really, its a spiral not a cycle. Parents can’t get a good-paying job and/or find a way to stop abusing drugs and alcohol, so they then abuse or neglect their almost always too many children from unstable revolving-door relationships, which leads to their kids growing up scared from misdirected rage-based violence. The children are mostly unsupported by consistent adult wisdom and affection, and what they do get is usually from mom only. Because of the home drama, children are unable to attend school regularly, which causes learning issues. They then often end up getting pregnant and/or dropping out of school due to mental illnesses like depression. Poorly parented teens often have their own kids which they don’t (or don’t know how to) take care of or educate properly not having had a proper education or upbringing themselves. The spiral of dysfunction grows ever bigger like rocks dropped into a pond.
My childhood in an urban neighborhood had lots of these kinds of piss-poor parents with low-paying or too hard non-union jobs, or they were single moms on welfare, with alcohol problems even if they were not alcoholics (usually the man of the house drank too much every night, but it was not always only the man drinking himself into a rage in the house) in every household. Four kids to a house was the average which usually was four kids too many. Families were primarily post- ex-WWII ex-farmers who couldn’t afford to raise any children, really, many people having dropped out of middle school. Not kidding. But you could count on the having of tons of beer and cigarettes in every house. No books except maybe a bible, despite that there were a lot of libraries and used books being sold by local Salvation Army and other thrift stores.
However, we baby boomer children of these wretched ignorant and impoverished parents had access to a lot of government programs initiated by President Johnson and Congress. If not for government programs, many baby boomers would never have had the opportunity to attend college on low-cost loans, following the example of awarding GI grants to returning military men from fighting in WWII. There was subsidized child care, free lunch programs for poor school children, mental health and regular health support systems created (free walk-in clinics), low-cost bus and train transportation. The public schools were given things like playgrounds, school nurses, libraries, music instruments, money for electives such as music and art classes, even public swimming pools were built near high schools and for the local communities. Working-class blue-collar men had the opportunity to get their GED’s through their places of employment, because employers agreed to participate in government supported education programs to men who had dropped out of high school to go to war or to the cities to work in war-related factories. Businesses were given tax credits if they offered free or low-cost medical insurance for their employees. The American government built roads, bridges, and power plants such as dams. Congress passed laws giving women access to the same rights as men, promoting programs to change public opinion on women as being small-brained cows to be encouraged to breed and clean toilets only.
I was there, folks. I was born in the 1950’s to shithole parents. I benefited from President Johnson’s efforts to uplift the poor and poorly educated.
Politicians could save these impoverished folks, today, now, and stop the spiral. Right? America has the resources, full stop. But except for a few decades here and there in the past, like the mid-1960’s/1970’s, politicians don’t help the poor or lower classes much in America. Unrestrained capitalism serves to help the rich get richer, and today the Republican Party is all about unrestrained capitalism. The Democrats help the poor more, but because of a strange toothlessness and a lack of will, supposedly due to lack of consensus, a reluctance to make waves and a need to get re-elected by being funded by wealthy people for campaign ads, Democrats don’t help the lower classes much except here and there, for a quarter or two of temporary financial support - but no quality continuing supportive training/education/medical care/community planning/infrastructure building which is necessary to change social ills.
In order to get elected, members of both American parties today kowtow to Big Business and billionaires and trillionaires who mostly pay for the politicians’ political campaigns, expecting to get in return the passage of congressional bills which support their not having to pay any taxes, hopefully forever, by cutting all programs that support the poor and lower classes. Free libraries are closing, government grants and low-cost loans for education are gone, a well-rounded educational curriculum at a university is being dismantled with access restricted to a select elite, support for free or low-cost child care is gone, government aid for new or damaged infrastructure is gone, access to free food for the poor is disappearing, low-cost access to medical care is going. Low-cost housing is gone. Lip support is increasing in a major push to all Americans to become a religious evangelical Christian, with actual laws being passed, state by state, enforcing evangelical Christianity rules and rituals on everyone regardless of previous beliefs. Evangelical Christianity insists women become slaves to men, stayinginside their homes, forgetting about education, but to stick to their role of being available for sex on demand, constant pregnancy, and raising children (evangelicals insist their God demands this arrangement for the lives of women as being best for females).
Today, we have an upper class elite which wants to replace those American bits of democratic and constitutional rights, especially those rules for freedom of religion, separation of church and state, a three-government-branches republic democracy, and being free of any religious policing of harmless social choices, which America had in place before President Trump was elected, with a government that will be a hardcore Christian theological dictatorship of pure racially White men and enslaved housebound women. Wealthy White-supremacist men, with the help of evangelical cults, hold the reins of power currently. They have successfully packed the U.S. Supreme Court with White evangelical supremacists and silenced the U.S Congress of strong voices speaking up to power. Voters who voted for these politicians selected by White supremacist trillionaires, hoping to gain economically in their private lives, have not yet seen any gains. In fact, only the incredibly wealthy have made economic gains. Huge surprise, right?
The modern rounds of wash/rinse/repeat of undemocratic ways of running America started with President Reagan’s Republican Party administration, btw. But the conservatives couldn’t make the cuts to helpful programs for the poor stick because in the next election, when Democrats usually were elected, some of the programs for the poor and programs for the good of the entire country, like infrastructure building and support for school lunches and preschool, were reinstated to some degree by the Democratic Party. However, the free clinics for psychiatric and medical care for the poor have never made a comeback since Reagan killed that support program.
Yes, Reagan started the dismantling of government support for the poor, getting rid of programs which helped them climb out of poverty into the middle class, to become educated by getting their GED’s free if they had dropped out for awhile, and having programs which helped kids graduate from high school with a quality education that included civics, music, sports and art. Reagan had advised prayer to fix things instead of government programs, much like what Republicans are telling their constituents today, as well.
In every theocratic empire in the world, prayers has not, or ever, worked though, except to enrich TV/media preachers and dictators, and scare impoverished citizens from thinking of any acts of fighting back because of the possibility of hellfire upon death as well as the certainty of public cancel culture and horrific punishments while living.
But clearly, the American wealthy were sick of the constant dismantling of the capitalism empire that they wanted. Then they got the right President, and the liberal judges on the Supreme Court were replaced by religious right-wing Christian evangelists, and in having already crippled many of the helpful programs which helped the poor understand the world through education in the Midwest and the South through Republican Party gerrymandering and cutting of programs to help the poor, and with the help of religious/White Supremacist radio talk shows which spew disinformation to people, the trillionaires got into power. The Republican Party even published a policy document outlining their plans that their supporters didn’t read, of course. I suppose when the Republicans still won elections after cutting money from their budgets that helped military veterans and poor children, even when they are always saying they support the vets and children only in speeches and not actually in life, they felt they could do anything, having sufficiently dumbed down their base. NAFTA gave Republicans the final push over the finish line of capturing a confused impoverished class of poorly educated workers. And opioid addiction was a godsend to wealthy Republicans who had money in Big Pharma stock. Ironically, it was southern Democrat President Clinton and a Republican Congress which brought NAFTA into being, a unified effort of wiping out union high-paying American jobs that did not require a high school degree…
Theological dictatorships are not good for common people, gentler reader, especially women.
The fall of the Roman Republic started like this….
July 27, 2025
Beth Macy, award-winning author of Dope Sick, has written this memoir which highlights why sometimes it's true that you can never go home again. How do we relate to old friends and family who have changed so dramatically that one no longer recognizes them? For example, she is aghast to learn that her ex-boyfriend—a very liberal person man, is now leading the opposition against Haitian immigrants. Urbana, Ohio has turned into an angry place, due in part to job losses but also due to the erosion of the social fabric of America. Despite the heavy subject this book is filled with empathy.
* I read an advance copy and was not compensated.
* I read an advance copy and was not compensated.
October 17, 2025
This is a profoundly important and timely book. Please stop everything and read it.
October 25, 2025
Don’t waste your time on Hillbilly Elegy, instead read this book.
December 3, 2025
Unfortunately, whatever point Macy meant to make was lost on me.
It has some of the ingredients of her best work —empathy, curiosity, and concern for the fraying American middle — but it’s massively unfocused. Billed as a memoir, it feels more like a patchwork of reflections, some personal, some sociopolitical, covering everything from the collapse of local journalism to her family’s history, her sister’s abusive husband, a liberal-turned-QAnon ex-boyfriend, and a profile of a trans teen. It all feels a little shapeless — like first drafts of five different books. Bummer.
It has some of the ingredients of her best work —empathy, curiosity, and concern for the fraying American middle — but it’s massively unfocused. Billed as a memoir, it feels more like a patchwork of reflections, some personal, some sociopolitical, covering everything from the collapse of local journalism to her family’s history, her sister’s abusive husband, a liberal-turned-QAnon ex-boyfriend, and a profile of a trans teen. It all feels a little shapeless — like first drafts of five different books. Bummer.
September 27, 2025
Beth Macy,you have done it once again……..great nf,impressive book! Part autobiography and part sociology/ history/culture and some politics thrown carefully into the mix.Each and every part informative and enjoyable. Comparing your growing up in Urbana,Ohio in the 70’s and 80’s to 2024,2025 was eye opening but not in a good way. Showing how far we have fallen from a seemingly low time but in reality not as bad as it has fallen now. Your town,like many other small/rural places in America,that you have shown,are all basically the same. Almost a non-existent Middle Class,poverty,loss of community through the shuttering of their newspapers,factories and the kids falling into drugs,truancy from schools,loss of interest in education and certainly no money for college if one desired to continue with their schooling.Your sense of humor helps one get over the low parts of your story at times. There is hope and a light at the end of a very long tunnel but it will take will power and strength to achieve those hopes and dreams.
Thank you NetGalley,Penguin Press,and author,Beth Macy for the opportunity to read the arc ebook,Paper Girl.
On Sale,October 07,2025
September 11, 2025
Spoilers, I guess, for the recent Ari Aster movie EDDINGTON!
If you hadn't spent the last decade reading thinkpieces, academic books, review essays, etc, about "what happened to the heartland," I think maybe this one would hit different. I was reading along, kind of lost in this particular story, but also filling in my bingo card with the concepts and expert voices that have become very familiar to anyone who was living online and reading "why Trump" stuff in this time frame (deaths of despair! the loss of local news! Covid denialism! Jeff Sharlet! Steven Conn!)
Macy, who grew up in Urbana, Ohio, and seems to be in her fifties or early sixties, is uniquely positioned to offer a longitudinal view of "what happened" to her various friends and acquaintances who transformed over the past decades from being fairly standard-issue centrist Midwesterners whose town - while it had its issues - enabled the rise of talented poor kids like Macy once was, into Trump voters who suspect the worst of everyone, shooting themselves in the foot (in one frustrating storyline) by refusing to accept grant funding for a resource center for at-risk youth, for complex reasons that might or might not all boil down to disliking the person in charge because he's queer.
I really appreciated, however, Macy's repeated insistence that the problem is not that nobody in Urbana in 2025 has money; it's that the Urbana that has money has definitively pulled away from the Urbana that doesn't, and there's no middle-class buffer. And the Urbana that has money votes for Trump, while the Urbana that doesn't either votes for him too, or just doesn't vote at all.
A persistent throughline is the abuse - documented or suspected - of children, from Macy's own niece, to a young trans graduate of Urbana High School who becomes one of the main characters, to the homeschooled kids whose disappearance from the public sphere Macy chronicles through ride-alongs with a truancy officer for the school system. This is dark as fuck and very real. Reminded me of the way Ari Aster's EDDINGTON put the abuse of the Emma Stone character, which her mother and husband deny, at the fulcrum of the plot, with the secrecy around it being the real "conspiracy theory." As one expert Macy interviews points out, if you saw that kind of coverup your whole life, why wouldn't you believe the people in power are hiding something?
If you hadn't spent the last decade reading thinkpieces, academic books, review essays, etc, about "what happened to the heartland," I think maybe this one would hit different. I was reading along, kind of lost in this particular story, but also filling in my bingo card with the concepts and expert voices that have become very familiar to anyone who was living online and reading "why Trump" stuff in this time frame (deaths of despair! the loss of local news! Covid denialism! Jeff Sharlet! Steven Conn!)
Macy, who grew up in Urbana, Ohio, and seems to be in her fifties or early sixties, is uniquely positioned to offer a longitudinal view of "what happened" to her various friends and acquaintances who transformed over the past decades from being fairly standard-issue centrist Midwesterners whose town - while it had its issues - enabled the rise of talented poor kids like Macy once was, into Trump voters who suspect the worst of everyone, shooting themselves in the foot (in one frustrating storyline) by refusing to accept grant funding for a resource center for at-risk youth, for complex reasons that might or might not all boil down to disliking the person in charge because he's queer.
I really appreciated, however, Macy's repeated insistence that the problem is not that nobody in Urbana in 2025 has money; it's that the Urbana that has money has definitively pulled away from the Urbana that doesn't, and there's no middle-class buffer. And the Urbana that has money votes for Trump, while the Urbana that doesn't either votes for him too, or just doesn't vote at all.
A persistent throughline is the abuse - documented or suspected - of children, from Macy's own niece, to a young trans graduate of Urbana High School who becomes one of the main characters, to the homeschooled kids whose disappearance from the public sphere Macy chronicles through ride-alongs with a truancy officer for the school system. This is dark as fuck and very real. Reminded me of the way Ari Aster's EDDINGTON put the abuse of the Emma Stone character, which her mother and husband deny, at the fulcrum of the plot, with the secrecy around it being the real "conspiracy theory." As one expert Macy interviews points out, if you saw that kind of coverup your whole life, why wouldn't you believe the people in power are hiding something?
October 12, 2025
Is this a feel good book with a positive message? Absolutely not. It is a hard look a the intellectual and psychological decay of American society. The book did not teach me more than I didn’t already know (or speculate). But It did point me in a direction of possible less tense, more open interactions with those who seeming have no empathy for others or those who are blinded by religion or conspiracy theories.
November 2, 2025
Unlike so often where my distracted brain jumps from book to book, I started and finished this in two days.
Beth Macy has been a favorite since my dad gave me Dopesick. He had met Ms Macy in Abingdon, his residence of many years and the location of key events in that book. Now, locations of our mutual childhoods in rural Ohio feature in this work.
I did not read this quickly because it was an easy read. Quite the opposite. It was often sad, infuriating, disheartening, and depressing. But, like with Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead (an author she reverently quotes multiple times), I know these people, I know these places, and the love these authors have for these places and people are so evident.
Macy loves these people, but like many of us who either never lived places like this or got out, does not fully understand them. This book is, in part, an attempt to try. Logically, she knows where some of it went wrong — trade agreements, loss of jobs, devaluation of education, and, of course, dear to her heart, the decline of local newspapers and traditional journalism. But she expresses the frustration many of us feel with the willful ignorance and blind allegiance to Trump, his billionaire cronies, and the lies they tell. The “protect what’s mine” even if it hurts others for no reason mindset. The blindness so many have to what is literally happening in our own communities.
The one frustration I had, although I knew not to expect it, is that there aren’t answers here. Just questions and a call for us to try to bridge the divides. I understand those too angry to do so. Actual harm has been caused by some of the people she met, and others like them. But I also don’t know how to create a better world for all of us without trying.
Beth Macy has been a favorite since my dad gave me Dopesick. He had met Ms Macy in Abingdon, his residence of many years and the location of key events in that book. Now, locations of our mutual childhoods in rural Ohio feature in this work.
I did not read this quickly because it was an easy read. Quite the opposite. It was often sad, infuriating, disheartening, and depressing. But, like with Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead (an author she reverently quotes multiple times), I know these people, I know these places, and the love these authors have for these places and people are so evident.
Macy loves these people, but like many of us who either never lived places like this or got out, does not fully understand them. This book is, in part, an attempt to try. Logically, she knows where some of it went wrong — trade agreements, loss of jobs, devaluation of education, and, of course, dear to her heart, the decline of local newspapers and traditional journalism. But she expresses the frustration many of us feel with the willful ignorance and blind allegiance to Trump, his billionaire cronies, and the lies they tell. The “protect what’s mine” even if it hurts others for no reason mindset. The blindness so many have to what is literally happening in our own communities.
The one frustration I had, although I knew not to expect it, is that there aren’t answers here. Just questions and a call for us to try to bridge the divides. I understand those too angry to do so. Actual harm has been caused by some of the people she met, and others like them. But I also don’t know how to create a better world for all of us without trying.
August 21, 2025
Beth Macy decided to return home to her hometown of Urbana, OH, and investigate how our country has become a fractured nation. In her personal life, as in many of our lives, political lines have been drawn - dividing families and small towns. Her memoir begins to investigate what has happened in America's small towns to embrace radical conservatism, and and the rise of Christian nationalism. The book brought up many uncomfortable subjects, and showed how the beginning of the decline of the working class started with the increase in the global economy. Many benefits that she grew up with - having her college tuition and expenses fully covered by her Pell grant, the presence of a thriving local news with fact-checked reporting all have disappeared. Macy used a family member, or a young person named Silas to document the changes in her community, and stress how difficult it is for a person in poverty to break the cycle. There were many statistics woven into the story and documented - some very disconcerting. Children living with a stepdad or live in partner are 10x more likely to experience abuse. 1 in 4 American girls are sexually abused by the age of 18 - 1/3 of those numbers are by family members. These are sobering stats. Truancy has escalated - and so hs homeschooling (with few guidelines). In Macy's book, bullies aren't just on playgrounds - they serve on school boards, they are mayors. Although her book is serious and sad it is admirable how Beth tries to keep the lines of communication open, and struggles to understand her family members and friends who have changed so dramatically. An eye opening read. Thank you to Netgalley for an advance reader copy!
October 6, 2025
In her 2018 bestseller, "Dopesick," journalist Beth Macy took us into the epicenter of America’s struggle with opioid addiction. In her new memoir, "Paper Girl," she returns to the rural Midwest of her childhood — the town of Urbana, Ohio — to explore the social and political changes that have happened there, as in so many parts of our country.
Macy explains that her hometown was hardly a utopia when she grew up there in the 1970s and ’80s. Her family was poor and her dad was an alcoholic, but some things were reliable: Urbana’s healthy economy nurtured a thriving middle-class, and people believed in the power of a college degree to lift them out of poverty. Residents also were proud of the town’s history as a stop on the Underground Railroad. But something happened over the past several decades, and when Macy began returning more regularly in 2020 to visit her ailing mother, she noticed Confederate flags flying and a wary populace that no longer trusted basic institutions like government, journalism and public education.
"Paper Girl" is part memoir, part reportage, part oral history, and the result is a comprehensive look at a microcosm of modern America. Macy explains how she was able to make it to college on a Pell Grant and the help of after-school jobs, caring teachers and numerous role models.
“If I lay out life in Urbana today and measure it against life there when I was growing up,” Macy writes, “the biggest shocker to me is the staggering decline of education, in both the formal and informal senses of the word. Not just how we acquire skills, but also how we learn to be human beings with each other, how we learn structure and responsibility and ambition.”
Macy grew up delivering the newspaper in Urbana — one of many local papers that no longer exist. She also grew up intent on a college education and believing that it was honorable and worthwhile. Now, she says, citing a 2022 poll, 37% of American voters agree with the statement that “college makes you lose common sense,” and four out of five Republicans believe that high school and college teachers are “trying to teach liberal propaganda.”
Macy showcases her stellar reporting skills in this nonfiction narrative, talking with old friends, family members, teachers and younger voices. One of them is recent Urbana High School graduate Silas James, whose experience she chronicles to draw stark comparisons between her own upbringing and the challenges facing today’s youth. Silas makes it into college, for example, but quickly drops out after his car breaks down and he can’t afford reliable transportation back and forth to class.
Much of "Paper Girl" is depressing, if not totally shocking. Macy describes one former classmate who spouts QAnon conspiracies, then gets angry and even violent when questioned about their credibility. The epidemic of misinformation has transformed so many American towns.
“People take their truths from other people they trust. They don’t use evidence to decide what’s true,” Macy writes. “Because national news is manufactured in cities, and rural people feel condescended to by city people, they’ve become frustrated with a system that has proved itself impotent to correct problems, and they think the only solution is to burn everything down.”
"Paper Girl" reflects the anger and discontent that have infiltrated our modern discourse. But Macy’s courage and truth-telling arms readers with crucial information that, if only heeded by the so-called "exhausted majority,” could prompt radical change.
[My reviews run every Monday on KMUW in Wichita. Find them here: https://www.kmuw.org/podcast/book-review]
Macy explains that her hometown was hardly a utopia when she grew up there in the 1970s and ’80s. Her family was poor and her dad was an alcoholic, but some things were reliable: Urbana’s healthy economy nurtured a thriving middle-class, and people believed in the power of a college degree to lift them out of poverty. Residents also were proud of the town’s history as a stop on the Underground Railroad. But something happened over the past several decades, and when Macy began returning more regularly in 2020 to visit her ailing mother, she noticed Confederate flags flying and a wary populace that no longer trusted basic institutions like government, journalism and public education.
"Paper Girl" is part memoir, part reportage, part oral history, and the result is a comprehensive look at a microcosm of modern America. Macy explains how she was able to make it to college on a Pell Grant and the help of after-school jobs, caring teachers and numerous role models.
“If I lay out life in Urbana today and measure it against life there when I was growing up,” Macy writes, “the biggest shocker to me is the staggering decline of education, in both the formal and informal senses of the word. Not just how we acquire skills, but also how we learn to be human beings with each other, how we learn structure and responsibility and ambition.”
Macy grew up delivering the newspaper in Urbana — one of many local papers that no longer exist. She also grew up intent on a college education and believing that it was honorable and worthwhile. Now, she says, citing a 2022 poll, 37% of American voters agree with the statement that “college makes you lose common sense,” and four out of five Republicans believe that high school and college teachers are “trying to teach liberal propaganda.”
Macy showcases her stellar reporting skills in this nonfiction narrative, talking with old friends, family members, teachers and younger voices. One of them is recent Urbana High School graduate Silas James, whose experience she chronicles to draw stark comparisons between her own upbringing and the challenges facing today’s youth. Silas makes it into college, for example, but quickly drops out after his car breaks down and he can’t afford reliable transportation back and forth to class.
Much of "Paper Girl" is depressing, if not totally shocking. Macy describes one former classmate who spouts QAnon conspiracies, then gets angry and even violent when questioned about their credibility. The epidemic of misinformation has transformed so many American towns.
“People take their truths from other people they trust. They don’t use evidence to decide what’s true,” Macy writes. “Because national news is manufactured in cities, and rural people feel condescended to by city people, they’ve become frustrated with a system that has proved itself impotent to correct problems, and they think the only solution is to burn everything down.”
"Paper Girl" reflects the anger and discontent that have infiltrated our modern discourse. But Macy’s courage and truth-telling arms readers with crucial information that, if only heeded by the so-called "exhausted majority,” could prompt radical change.
[My reviews run every Monday on KMUW in Wichita. Find them here: https://www.kmuw.org/podcast/book-review]
October 24, 2025
This was an excellent but depressing read that was part memoir and part a look at how the US has devolved with far right narrative. At the same time, the author is really fair and does show how "coastal elitism" and the privileged left have increasingly edged out working class citizens. The most insightful part to her argument was about systemic trauma and how breaking the cycle is so hard. It was such a super interesting read and yet the memoir parts helped make it really easy to follow and fast-paced. Highly recommend.
November 6, 2025
Phenomenal book - a mix of a memoir and a magazine feature piece on the state of the author's small hometown in Ohio this is a great read if you are trying to understand the mindset of the small rural voter. It was the perfect segue for me, as I am trying to understand the White Christian Nationalist voter. Beside the obvious racism, much of what Macy (the author) found was the level of mis-information that runs in these small towns. Everyone in this town seems to get their news from questionable news sources or non-news sources on the dark web. Education is lacking. Macy tracks how this happened, how government grant money for college dried up and this left a lot of people in these small towns stranded. Local newspapers all but closed down - it is a perfect storm. the only time people open their minds is when they encounter the "other," having a daughter who is gay, a son who wants to transition, etc.
What I liked about this book was that Macy really humanizes the people who to me, are just these blobby MAGA voters. It doesn't make me sympathize but it certainly helps me understand why they vote as they do (against their own interests). Truly, in these locations the billionaire class has bamboozled these people.
Also what really struck me is that despite the odds, there were some kids, including the author, who got out of these vicious cycle, didn't succumb to drugs and a dead-end job. Of course, as the author shows, in this day and age, for kids in this town to "make it" requires a whole team - as the voters in this county voted again and again to deny money for aid and assistance (again voting against themselves).
I definitely recommend for those who want to understand more about the MAGA voter in a very relatable read (nothing too academic). Super easy to speed through.
What I liked about this book was that Macy really humanizes the people who to me, are just these blobby MAGA voters. It doesn't make me sympathize but it certainly helps me understand why they vote as they do (against their own interests). Truly, in these locations the billionaire class has bamboozled these people.
Also what really struck me is that despite the odds, there were some kids, including the author, who got out of these vicious cycle, didn't succumb to drugs and a dead-end job. Of course, as the author shows, in this day and age, for kids in this town to "make it" requires a whole team - as the voters in this county voted again and again to deny money for aid and assistance (again voting against themselves).
I definitely recommend for those who want to understand more about the MAGA voter in a very relatable read (nothing too academic). Super easy to speed through.
October 25, 2025
This book has so many layers to it!
As I read this book, I kept thinking about things I heard my grandparents and other people (especially older people) say in the past 10-15 years, "We used to know who our neighbors were". And they didn't mean just the people who lived geographically right near them - they meant the people who lived in town and even neighboring towns. But how did our grandparents learn about their neighbors? Well, together they belonged to civic clubs, sports clubs, churches, etc, they worked together in town or close to town, their kids went to the same schools together in town, but they also read stories in the paper about things going on in town and about the people of the town. When a community loses their local newspaper, they lose their local news - the stories that bind them like a tribe. Without dedicated local newspapers and community binding events, most people only know about "big news", "national trends", and "screaming headlines". This disconnection from community has deprived us from truly knowing our neighbors and enabled us to freely "hate" those people and things we cannot understand. Without a connection to people who are different from us, we have no way of building a bridge over our differences. Thus, the fracturing of society.
For me, from my perspective, this book did a phenomenal job describing what we as educators see within our communities that few others see. Some of those things are terrifying, some depressing, and some amazing and hopeful - but unless you are in a school, law enforcement, an EMT/firefighter, social worker, or nurse in or close to your community, you probably never would know some of the things going on. That sometimes causes a type of fracture where groups of people legitimately have different narratives of the very place they both live.
As I read this book, I kept thinking about things I heard my grandparents and other people (especially older people) say in the past 10-15 years, "We used to know who our neighbors were". And they didn't mean just the people who lived geographically right near them - they meant the people who lived in town and even neighboring towns. But how did our grandparents learn about their neighbors? Well, together they belonged to civic clubs, sports clubs, churches, etc, they worked together in town or close to town, their kids went to the same schools together in town, but they also read stories in the paper about things going on in town and about the people of the town. When a community loses their local newspaper, they lose their local news - the stories that bind them like a tribe. Without dedicated local newspapers and community binding events, most people only know about "big news", "national trends", and "screaming headlines". This disconnection from community has deprived us from truly knowing our neighbors and enabled us to freely "hate" those people and things we cannot understand. Without a connection to people who are different from us, we have no way of building a bridge over our differences. Thus, the fracturing of society.
For me, from my perspective, this book did a phenomenal job describing what we as educators see within our communities that few others see. Some of those things are terrifying, some depressing, and some amazing and hopeful - but unless you are in a school, law enforcement, an EMT/firefighter, social worker, or nurse in or close to your community, you probably never would know some of the things going on. That sometimes causes a type of fracture where groups of people legitimately have different narratives of the very place they both live.
November 11, 2025
I had a hard time making myself finish….incredibly biased and I must say, outdated, in view of the revelations and events since January up to the time of book release. Definitely exemplifies liberal world view and intolerance of any other Christian/Conservative world view. 25% memoir, 75% agenda. Incredible blind spot in the reasoning for dying legacy media/news, and cherry-picks history as explanation of our national problems. While much of her vitriol is directed at people she would categorize as like me, it is based in ignorance and blind intolerance. Definitely not the caliber of Dopesick
November 20, 2025
I was excited for this book but excitement quickly turned to hate reading this book. This is mostly a woman with seemingly little social awareness ranting about politics while only discussing her hometown at a surface level. Just pages and pages of not understanding that people may not be fond of her because she tells them how their political beliefs are wrong.
October 25, 2025
This is a very timely and important look at a modern fractured America during the decline of intellectualism and the education system, the rise of the opioid epidemic, and the political lines that are dividing families and friends. This book focuses on journalist author Beth Macy’s return to her hometown of Urbana, Ohio. Macy came from poverty, but through a Pell Grant, she was able to go to college and make a successful life for herself, as difficult as this experience often was for her. Upon Beth’s return to Urbana, she notes the many political and sociological changes that make it much more difficult for those in poverty to get ahead in our current climate. Although I am from Canada, I live in a conservative, small city where there is a major opioid and homelessness issue, and many of Beth’s findings were similar to what I see here.
I love the way that Macy writes and reports. This book was engaging, and I also appreciated the importance Macy places on teachers and the education system in often being the only place where marginalized kids find safety and solace. I found it enjoyable to listen to Macy herself narrate the audiobook. 4/5
I love the way that Macy writes and reports. This book was engaging, and I also appreciated the importance Macy places on teachers and the education system in often being the only place where marginalized kids find safety and solace. I found it enjoyable to listen to Macy herself narrate the audiobook. 4/5
October 9, 2025
TYSM Penguin Randomhouse Audio for the gifted Audiobook. The best memoir I’ve read this year, full stop. If you live in a blue bubble big city and want to understand what’s happening in small towns, read this book.
October 29, 2025
Backward Mobility
(noun): A decline in socioeconomic status.
With Paper Girl, Beth Macy, best known for her coverage of America's opioid crisis in Dopesick, delivers a part memoir, part study of small-town America set in her hometown of Urbana, Ohio.
Macy offers a pretty damning account of the consequence of our government's failure to address the effects deindustrialization, opioid drug addiction, and the ongoing housing and educational crises in America's heartland.
Rural places have lost 48% of their jobs in agriculture, forestry, mining, construction, transportation, and production since the 1970s. People are angry, and they're struggling.
As corporate profits have soared since the 1980s, the middle class has struggled, with wages stagnating, the cost of housing and healthcare far outpacing inflation, and addiction rates - including to American-made opioids leniently labeled and liberally distributed - ravaging communities the country over.
And while our 36th President, Lyndon B. Johnson, once proclaimed, "At the desk where I sit, I have learned one great truth. The answer to our national problems - the answer for all the problems in the world - comes down to a single word. That word is 'education'," today our nation's student loan debt ($1.75 trillion) exceeds its credit card debt. And yet, we continue to privatize education while delivering poorer results than other developed countries. Pell Grants, which once covered the majority of tuition and board for qualifying low income households, have been gutted and are now denounced by many as a "welfare handout."
Thomas Jefferson once said, "Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter." And yet, today a concerning amount of conservatives consider the media "the enemy of the people," and more than one-third of Americans don't even read the news. What's more, we starved this public good by allowing technology companies like Google and Facebook to algorithmically feed us incendiary content not grounded in fact. When these tech titans assumed advertising channels that once supported print media, local news was decimated and national media began relying on divisive politics and shock-and-awe reporting to capture clicks.
Paper Girl is only part memoir. Macy is perhaps most open about her mother's dementia, her father's alcoholism, her strained relationship with her sister over their gaping wide political divide (thank you, modern politics), her relative's refusal (at first) to accept a life-saving kidney transplant because the donor received a COVID vaccine, and how she narrowly escaped the struggles that plague her hometown, finding a path through higher education and a career in writing.
Macy's life story provides insight to those who don't see the struggles of globalization and deindustrialization, who don't live in poverty or with family members besieged by addiction. These lives are real, and they're a reality for many American communities.
While it's a good read, I couldn't recommend it to everyone. Her politics are no secret. I suspect she would gain little empathy from those who disagree with her progressive leftward leaning, despite it being a powerfully personal story and one of a hometown that barely registers as "home" anymore. I suspect there will be readers who set the book aside when Macy tells the story of a trans highschool graduate struggling in their rural community, when she describes political fixed mindedness as a potential result of socioeconomic trauma, when she tells of a majority today who is terrified by the prospect of becoming a racial minority, of decades of failed trickle-down economic policies, and of a populace so scared for their and their family's future that they would trade their civil liberties and much of what built this country for a mere promise of security and stability.
Paper Girl is a charged read, meandering between memoir and sociological study. Why it gets a solid 3 is because it would've been far more effective as only one or the other - but sadly not both.
3 of 5
With Paper Girl, Beth Macy, best known for her coverage of America's opioid crisis in Dopesick, delivers a part memoir, part study of small-town America set in her hometown of Urbana, Ohio.
Macy offers a pretty damning account of the consequence of our government's failure to address the effects deindustrialization, opioid drug addiction, and the ongoing housing and educational crises in America's heartland.
Rural places have lost 48% of their jobs in agriculture, forestry, mining, construction, transportation, and production since the 1970s. People are angry, and they're struggling.
As corporate profits have soared since the 1980s, the middle class has struggled, with wages stagnating, the cost of housing and healthcare far outpacing inflation, and addiction rates - including to American-made opioids leniently labeled and liberally distributed - ravaging communities the country over.
And while our 36th President, Lyndon B. Johnson, once proclaimed, "At the desk where I sit, I have learned one great truth. The answer to our national problems - the answer for all the problems in the world - comes down to a single word. That word is 'education'," today our nation's student loan debt ($1.75 trillion) exceeds its credit card debt. And yet, we continue to privatize education while delivering poorer results than other developed countries. Pell Grants, which once covered the majority of tuition and board for qualifying low income households, have been gutted and are now denounced by many as a "welfare handout."
Thomas Jefferson once said, "Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter." And yet, today a concerning amount of conservatives consider the media "the enemy of the people," and more than one-third of Americans don't even read the news. What's more, we starved this public good by allowing technology companies like Google and Facebook to algorithmically feed us incendiary content not grounded in fact. When these tech titans assumed advertising channels that once supported print media, local news was decimated and national media began relying on divisive politics and shock-and-awe reporting to capture clicks.
Paper Girl is only part memoir. Macy is perhaps most open about her mother's dementia, her father's alcoholism, her strained relationship with her sister over their gaping wide political divide (thank you, modern politics), her relative's refusal (at first) to accept a life-saving kidney transplant because the donor received a COVID vaccine, and how she narrowly escaped the struggles that plague her hometown, finding a path through higher education and a career in writing.
Macy's life story provides insight to those who don't see the struggles of globalization and deindustrialization, who don't live in poverty or with family members besieged by addiction. These lives are real, and they're a reality for many American communities.
While it's a good read, I couldn't recommend it to everyone. Her politics are no secret. I suspect she would gain little empathy from those who disagree with her progressive leftward leaning, despite it being a powerfully personal story and one of a hometown that barely registers as "home" anymore. I suspect there will be readers who set the book aside when Macy tells the story of a trans highschool graduate struggling in their rural community, when she describes political fixed mindedness as a potential result of socioeconomic trauma, when she tells of a majority today who is terrified by the prospect of becoming a racial minority, of decades of failed trickle-down economic policies, and of a populace so scared for their and their family's future that they would trade their civil liberties and much of what built this country for a mere promise of security and stability.
Paper Girl is a charged read, meandering between memoir and sociological study. Why it gets a solid 3 is because it would've been far more effective as only one or the other - but sadly not both.
3 of 5
Read
November 19, 2025I learned lots. I have some empathy with people in small communities in the “heartland”. I don’t see it the same way many of them do but I can understand a wee bit more how they got there.
p. 38
“…President Lyndon B Johnson told the nation, “At the desk where I sit, I have learned one great truth. The answer to our national problems—the answer for all the problems of the world—comes down to a single word. That word is ‘education’”. (1964)
p. 295
“His (JD Vance) educational platform was all about beefing up private school vouchers and religious education and doing away with the Department of Education. If you want to quantify the price of ignorance, here’s one number: The State of Ohio was now spending nearly $1 billion annually on private school vouchers that mainly benefited kids who are already attending private schools. (2024)
SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL SCHOOLS! Buy the raffle tickets, attend the craft fairs and concerts, give your cans to their bottle drives and food bank collections…it’s important!
p. 38
“…President Lyndon B Johnson told the nation, “At the desk where I sit, I have learned one great truth. The answer to our national problems—the answer for all the problems of the world—comes down to a single word. That word is ‘education’”. (1964)
p. 295
“His (JD Vance) educational platform was all about beefing up private school vouchers and religious education and doing away with the Department of Education. If you want to quantify the price of ignorance, here’s one number: The State of Ohio was now spending nearly $1 billion annually on private school vouchers that mainly benefited kids who are already attending private schools. (2024)
SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL SCHOOLS! Buy the raffle tickets, attend the craft fairs and concerts, give your cans to their bottle drives and food bank collections…it’s important!
December 21, 2025
Audio at 1.5x read very well by author
If I hadn’t been working as a surgeon in rural America these past few years, I might discount try his book. But I have and it is nothing like our urban and suburban communities. The conspiracy theorists are out there. They are not getting their needed medical care because of it. My heart breaks for the young man who wouldn’t accept a kidney from a Covid vaccinated person. My son has a kidney transplant and it was lifesaving. I have had patients taking antibiotics and anti parasitics that were meant for their farm animals. I have had a patient want to delay cancer treatment because Trump was going to release the ’Medbed’ (not real) and that would cure him. I laughed at this stuff before and derided these people. I do not do that anymore. It’s not funny. I know these people as people and genuinely want to understand why and how they have embraced these beliefs.
If I hadn’t been working as a surgeon in rural America these past few years, I might discount try his book. But I have and it is nothing like our urban and suburban communities. The conspiracy theorists are out there. They are not getting their needed medical care because of it. My heart breaks for the young man who wouldn’t accept a kidney from a Covid vaccinated person. My son has a kidney transplant and it was lifesaving. I have had patients taking antibiotics and anti parasitics that were meant for their farm animals. I have had a patient want to delay cancer treatment because Trump was going to release the ’Medbed’ (not real) and that would cure him. I laughed at this stuff before and derided these people. I do not do that anymore. It’s not funny. I know these people as people and genuinely want to understand why and how they have embraced these beliefs.
October 17, 2025
How do we reestablish a dialogue with people about what’s going on in their lives that’s respectful…? -David Axelrod
Urbana, Ohio, Macy’s hometown, as a microcosm of America. Macy employs her deft narrative nonfiction into stories of people, stories of places and stories of the political moment. With a mix of sardonic wit every now and then.
This book explains, basically, how people can believe lies and demonize people
Urbana, Ohio, Macy’s hometown, as a microcosm of America. Macy employs her deft narrative nonfiction into stories of people, stories of places and stories of the political moment. With a mix of sardonic wit every now and then.
This book explains, basically, how people can believe lies and demonize people
October 19, 2025
Beth Macy’s books are page turners, so easy to read. She weaves together personal stories and research beautifully, making the reading a joy and the impact profound.
Paper Girl has given me a new appreciation of the forces at work in small town America: the decline of American institutions (schools, newspapers, factories) and the traumas of working class Americans (addiction, sexual abuse, job displacement). The problems are decades in the making, and the solutions difficult to scale. However, Macy makes room for hope and action, one person’s story at a time.
Paper Girl has given me a new appreciation of the forces at work in small town America: the decline of American institutions (schools, newspapers, factories) and the traumas of working class Americans (addiction, sexual abuse, job displacement). The problems are decades in the making, and the solutions difficult to scale. However, Macy makes room for hope and action, one person’s story at a time.
October 16, 2025
An essential book for these times. I liked the audiobook so much that I bought two hardcover copies- one for myself and one for a conservative family member, also from rural Ohio. The plan: read a chapter per week and discuss. Maybe we’ll find out we’re not as far apart as it seems. Here’s hoping.
December 10, 2025
4.5 stars
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