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.
