Paper Girl, by Beth Macy: Astute Insight into Our Fractured World

We really are pretty screwed...

Let me just cut to the chase: Beth Macy’s part-memoir, part-sociological study,Paper Girl, is easily one of the best things I’ve read this year. Macy is a magnificent storyteller and her writing here is astute, relatable, and clear. As difficult as this book often is to read, I loved every word of it.

Of course, there is no shortage of books, articles, tweets, Facebook posts from your uncle, memes, late-night heart-to-hearts at the bar, and signs on the side of the road purporting to explain our current political moment and how we got here. This book provides the clearest explanation I’ve read yet. It’s Hillbilly Elegy without the condescension, fallacy, and disingenuousness.

Macy is a former journalist who quit the media to write award-winning investigative books like Dopesick, Factory Man, and several others. She grew up in the small town of Urbana, Ohio, poor and with little opportunity. However, she received a Pell Grant to go to college, worked hard, and made herself a success. This book is about her childhood in Urbana. But the goal of the book is to show Urbana as a microcosm of small-town-America, and how small-town-America is different now than then, how young people in Urbana now don’t have the same opportunities for upward mobility (class migration) she had, why that’s the case, and how that’s given rise to the MAGA cult.

It’s so engrossing, not the least because I also grew up in a small town in Ohio just 30 miles from Urbana. Like Macy, I also delivered newspapers as a kid and aspired to be a journalist. For Macy, her career as a writer informs her central argument here: She draws a clear and logically argued line from the death of local newspapers to the rise in national extremism. No longer do people know about or identify with their neighbors -- especially those who are different than them. Now, they more identify with national trends they’re fed on their echo chamber news station or on their social media feeds algorithmically curated to keep them outraged. The disappearance of the small-town newspaper, she argues, is the main reason why one side of the political spectrum suddenly fell under the thrall of an orange conspiracy-theory spewing felonious carnival barker.

But the death of local news is only part of the problem. The lack of support and funding for public schools, the rising cost of college, the uptick in “homeschooling” in rural areas (which often isn’t really school at all), and new laws in mainly red states that allow parents to pull kids out of public school for “religious education” have all combined to create a culture that de-emphasizes the value of actual education. From there, it’s easy to see why people ignorant of the world around them are finding solace in the craziest of crazy ideas.

These two are just the tip of the iceberg -- job opportunities being shipped overseas, online culture that rewards the loudest and most outrageous behavior, widespread drug addiction, and politicians with little integrity and even less care for the people they supposedly govern are all contributing factors, Macy writes.

Macy makes these points by telling the stories of real people she meets and spends time with during a year-and-a-half she spends back in Urbana to write this book. There’s a trans teenager named Silas studying to be a welder, but running into one problem after another. There’s Macy’s niece Liza, who was sexually assaulted by her stepfather. There’s Macy’s ex-boyfriend Bill, the most liberal person she knew in the 1980s, who has turned angry conspiracy theorist. And there’s the MAGA Urbana mayor who leads the charge to turn down state-granted funds for a youth center because the guy running the youth center is gay. It’s just all so impossibly sad.

The result, though, of Macy’s research is an immensely readable, fascinating book I could not put down. Frankly, there’s not really anything new here -- or at least nothing very surprising. But Macy’s journalistic gift for presentation -- for explaining these complex issues in terms that are easy to understand -- makes this book feel fresh and the arguments original. You hear this frequently, but I truly mean this: This is a book every American should read.