Paper Girl by Beth Macy

Beth Macy is a journalist who has written several acclaimed nonfiction books, including Factory Man, the story of a Virginia furniture maker who battled to save his company and prevent hundreds of American manufacturing jobs from being lost to offshoring, and Dopesick, a chronicle of America's opioid epidemic.

Her newest book, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America, published in 2025, recounts her upbringing in the 1970s and 1980s in what was once solidly middle-class Urbana, Ohio. As Macy returned to Urbana to care for her ailing mother in early 2020, she found a place starkly different — economically, politically and culturally — from the town where she came of age tossing newspapers from her 10-speed bike.

Urbana, she writes, has become "poorer, sicker, angrier, and less educated." In this book, she sets out to understand why.

There's no one clear culprit, but rather a convergence of forces. Manufacturing jobs have disappeared as a result of technology, globalization and the decline of unions. Mental health issues and drug addiction have soared, as has absenteeism in schools, especially after the Covid-19 pandemic. Macy argues that political polarization has exacerbated many of these problems.

Emblematic of the changes is the gutting of the local newspaper she once delivered. Macy presents the decline of Urbana's newspaper as a stand-in for the overall diminishment of people's sense of community and the erosion of trust in institutions. It's a story that's been repeated in many towns across America, as newspapers shutter or shrink under the weight of shifting media consumption habits and failed business models. Macy describes the loss of a functioning newspaper as leaving a profound void in a community. She despairs that her own siblings, once extremely proud of her journalism career, no longer have faith in any news organizations other than Fox News and Newsmax.

Macy did not have an idyllic childhood in Urbana. She grew up poor, with an alcoholic father, while her loving and no-nonsense mother toiled long hours in an aviation parts factory. But Macy was a good student and managed to become the first in her family to go to college, with the help of a Pell Grant covering her tuition, housing and books. She laments how that federal program covers far less of college costs than it once did, as the price of higher education has skyrocketed.

Even a high school diploma is out of reach for many today in her hometown. Her high school went from graduating 186 students in 1982 to just 91 four decades later. It's not for a lack of caring educators, some of whom she interviews in the book, that students are not thriving. Macy confesses that she once believed — naively, it turns out — that a simple cash infusion into a program like Pell Grants could fix the problem, but she now thinks public education needs a much more radical overhaul to meet students' overall physical, intellectual and emotional needs.

In Paper Girl, journalist Beth Macy finds it's not so easy to go home again.

This book is highly personal. Macy recounts her uneasy relationship and stark political disagreements with many of her family members, and she writes candidly about these ruptures. She also reports on long-standing allegations of child abuse in the family, which have left deep scars.

I would have been interested in learning more about the economic drivers of the town's decline, but that is not the main focus of this book. For readers who want more of this context, I highly recommend Janesville by Washington Post reporter Amy Goldstein, which tells the story of the shuttering of a General Motors factory in Wisconsin, and the consequences for the workers and their families. This 2017 book is an impressive feat of reporting, with vivid accounts of how job loss ripples through a community. Goldstein followed her subjects for years in the aftermath of the plant's closing as they struggled to find new livelihoods.

After reading Paper Girl, I looked up Macy to find out more about her and discovered that she is now running for Congress to represent her southwest Virginia district. It may help explain the book's timing and framing. It's not disqualifying to me in recommending the book, although it does chip away perhaps at the authenticity of the project.

Overall, this is a thought-provoking book and addresses important issues in contemporary America that should be top of mind for everyone.