Release Date:- 2025-10-07
Availability:- In Stock
Kind:- ebook
"There couldnāt 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." āThe Washington Post
From one of our most acclaimed chroniclers of the forces eroding Americaās social fabric, her most personal and powerful work: 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 ā70s and ā80sācertainly 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 Macyās motherās health declined in 2020, she couldnāt shake the feeling that her town had dramatically hardened. Macy had grown up as the paper girl, delivering the local newspaper, which was the communityās 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 didnāt 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-boyfriendāonce the most liberal person she knewābecame 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 motherās death, she decided to figure out what happened to Urbana in the forty years since sheād 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 truthāin person, with respectāshe has found sparks of human dignity that she has used to light a signal fire of warning but also of hope.
