Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in Fractured America. Penguin Press, 2025.
Reviewed by Trudy Goldberg
In Paper Girl, Journalist Beth Macy–author of Dopesick, the best–selling investigation of the U.S. opioid epidemic—turns her sharp eye to Urbana, her hometown in rural Ohio. About ten years ago, Macy started noticing some changes during frequent trips home: “Something was rotting beneath the surface of my postcard–cute hometown. It wasn’t just that kids like me weren’t going to college. Many were not even graduating high school.” Urbana high school went from graduating 186 seniors in 1982, Macy’s year, to less than half that number four decades later.
One of the poorest kids in town, Macy was more neglected than abused by her alcoholic father, “the town drunk.” She “found refuge” in her friends’ homes or the living room of her grandmother who taught her to read and write and play checkers. She “took solace” in the nearby public library and the public school and “the women in charge of those sacred places who were also my demigods.”
The book title, Paper Girl, refers to the author’s job delivering the local newspaper, The Urbana Daily Citizen. The name has become a misnomer—it only publishes twice a week; its staff of two is down from seven full–timers in the mid–1980s; and its pages are largely relegated to press releases and high school sports. The decline of the Urbana Public Citizen is a microcosm of the loss of local news throughout the country. Trump, Macy observes, won 91% of the counties lacking a professional source of local news. Not surprisingly, Macy found that the middle– and upper–middle class Urbanans had no idea what was happening in their community.
They had no inkling that more than 20 percent of kids weren’t even showing up at school.
Macy deeply regrets the decline in the value of the Pell grant and in federal support for higher education. Average college tuition has tripled since she went to college, and the neediest students now have roughly only a third of their costs covered by Pell grants. Aside from the advantages of a country’s having an educated citizenry and work force, Macy points out the financial benefits of Pell grants to the government: that it recoups the money spent on the typical Pell grantee through taxes on increased earnings in just ten years.
In addition to the earnings advantages of college over high school graduation, Macy cites evidence that college grads are less prone to despair and addiction and have longer lifespans compared to those with just a high school education. There are indications, however, that the college degree may be losing its edge. A recent study by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland found that the long–standing advantage of young college graduates over their high school–educated peers has nearly vanished.
Macy writes that Ronald Reagan “compared Pell grantees to welfare moms as he quietly, methodically set about cutting federal aid to education in half.”1 Reagan’s policies, she reminds us, also contributed to current public ignorance and susceptibility to conspiracy theories. The Federal Communications Commission appointed by Reagan ended the fairness doctrine with its rule that stations had to present information honestly and fairly and to present contrasting points of view. Abortion remains a source of deep distortion and division—just one of the distortions that might have been mitigated by continuance of the fairness doctrine and access to professional sources of local news.
But the neo–liberal Democrats who followed Reagan do not escape Macy’s censure. Clinton brought us NAFTA. Obama reneged on a promise to change bankruptcy laws that would have helped struggling homeowners; bailed out big banks and carmakers; and supported “unprecedented mergers” in big tech and pharma. Macy might have added the failure of Democrats to support the labor movement, that even when Democrats have controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress, organized labor has been unable to win any federal legislation to support collective bargaining rights.
The number of Urbana children living in poverty more than tripled since Macy left town, and the children orphaned by the opioid crisis tripled since 2015. “After the jobs went away, heroin helped itself to my hometown, followed by fentanyl and meth.”2 “The resultant trauma,” Macy writes, “overtaxes all the systems meant to address it.” One in three full–time workers carried union cards when she was coming of age; the current rate is one in ten.
Macy’s sharp investigative eye views her subject from several vantage points—comparing her higher–education escape from poverty to that of current promising students who are trying to make the break; interviewing school and other officials coping with the problems created by high unemployment and drug–affliction; trying to understand why former friends turn toward the far Right and conspiracy theories; and seeking interpretive insights from written work and interviews of a wide range of experts. One of the latter that comes to mind is that of the prescient philosopher Richard Rorty who, in 1998, predicted that globalization and increasing inequality would lead to deep class resentment and ultimately to fascism.3
In her talks with family and friends who hold views wildly different from her own and erroneous—that abortion permits women to kill their babies after birth—Macy shows respect and talks about something other than politics. With her once ultra–liberal ex–boyfriend who falsely claimed that Haitians were automatically getting $600 to $1,600 monthly in Social Security benefits, she traded tips on gardening and sent him seedlings of her favorite heirloom tomato which he nurtured and sent her photographs of via text.
Am important encounter is with Macy’s sister Cookie who has refused to admit that her daughter Liza was repeatedly sexually abused by her stepdad—crimes with devastating, lifetime effects on Liza to whom this book is dedicated. Ultimately, because of Beth’s efforts, Cookie offers to apologize to Liza, but it is too late for Liza to accept it.
Silas James is the main character in Macy’s probe of Urbana’s decline. Silas, like the author, was the drum major of the Urbana High School Marching Band. Graduating from high school in 2023, he had two full scholarships “all teed up and waiting for him at a nearby community college in a nearby city.” Silas wanted to become a welder, an occupation in demand that would pay him more than anyone in his family had ever earned–except for a few drug dealers!
Poverty, paternal alcoholism and neglect were part of the life of the Paper Girl, but Macy’s background was far less debilitating than that of Silas who was homeless for most of his junior and senior years. His mom had been in jail on several rounds of drug charges, and, in Silas’ junior year, his dad died of a methadone overdose. A distant relative who sheltered Silas and his siblings ended up in jail on charges related to molesting minors.
“This is a reality,” Macy writes, “I could not have conceived of in Urbana forty years before, when I knew of no homeless people and certainly no one who’d lost a parent to overdose.” But Silas was not alone among the students recommended to Macy by teachers who considered them both poor and exemplary. Almost every kid she interviewed had been molested by a guardian.
Silas wrote enthusiastically about his first days in college—cafeteria fare, the sliding–scale health center, the mentor assigned to him as a first–generation college student. “Everything you can think of, they have it here.” The college webmaster had posted his photo on the home page during the first week of school—something Macy observes,
Silas had never imagined… when he was homeless during long stretches of his junior and senior years of high school nearly dropping out several times.
This happiness didn’t last:
…on the third day of class, the head gasket blew on his Saturn Ion, a beater that was older than Silas by three years. The car was a goner. The next day, a relative he was staying with was injured in a car accident and left the hospital with a concussion so severe she required around–the–clock supervision. Which is how he ended up a college dropout before the end of the first semester’s first week. The family organizing and caretaking had fallen to Silas as it often did.
That is not the end of Silas’ story. He does return to college and excels in courses in welding and engineering, even though he found the latter dry and theoretical.
The transportation problem is one that plagued Macy during her college years. And it remains a formidable barrier for most rural students. “What good was a double scholarship if a student had no way to get to their free classes?” This barrier, she observes, helps to explain why 40 percent of community college students drop out before getting a certificate or degree.
Interestingly, although Silas is trans and romantically involved with another man, this didn’t seem to be a major barrier. When he told his eighth–grade principal he would not be wearing the requisite dress to his high school promotion ceremony, the principal said, “I’m not going to make you.” That was his first time wearing a suit. Silas always tells job interviewers that he is trans and that if they can’t handle that, he’ll work somewhere else. “But most people are like, ‘No, that’s fine.’” There is, however, considerable homophobia in Urbana. Sister Cookie refers to the homosexuality of one of the author’s sons as “an abomination.” A popular, retired coach and teacher sadly reveals:
When our daughter gets married to her wife, there are good friends here that we won’t be able to invite because she’ll ‘rot in hell.’
“It has fallen to public school workers, who are already beyond stressed,” Macy writes, “to provide much of the social safety net.” And there is much evidence in this book of deep devotion to students on the part of school staff. “For years, teachers and counselors had been praying and pulling strings for Silas to graduate, extending shoulder and untold hours of support and sometimes even their spare bedrooms.” Cassie Cress, an Urbana High School English teacher, “became a lifeline for many struggling students.” In his retirement, Lance Jackson helps at–risk students at the youth center, prepping them for GED tests, giving them rides to work and teaching them employability skills. Truancy Officer Brooke Perry took one girl who’d dramatically improved her attendance to a comic Con gathering in Columbus on a Saturday, paying the way. “I try to give 100 percent and not be judgmental,” says Perry.
Race has a mixed past in Urbana and a troubling present. Macy’s hometown was “once a Union stronghold and a proud stop on the Underground Railroad,” but it is “no longer unusual” to see Confederate flags on a drive through town. A lynching in 1897 was also part of Urbana’s past. Mark Evans, a biracial classmate of Macy, got a historical marker for the Underground Railroad placed in Urbana “in honor of his black, Native American, and white ancestors who helped run it.” When Mitchell tried to present the story of the lynched man falsely accused of raping a white woman at a local Juneteenth festival, the answer was: “No Way.” No Urbana minister would marry Evans’ white father and black mother in a church, and his father, a police officer, tells how his family was “denied apartments and home loans, fired from jobs without cause, treated poorly by co–workers and neighbors alike.”
What does Macy propose in addition to the respectful dialogues that she recounts in this book? She calls attention to the fact that thirty million poor and low–wage people didn’t bother to vote in the 2024 election. Silas was one of them. In the first week in his second term, “Trump 2.0 banned trans people in the military, signed an order recognizing only male and female genders, and tried to ban trans care for minors….” If we want to hold onto our democracy,” writes Macy, “there is work to be done, voters to register, resistance to sow.” But what side will they be on?
Macy has taken her own advice and is running for Congress in her adopted state of Virginia. But what policy changes does Macy propose? She acknowledges that deep problems and devastation came “after the jobs went away?” (emphasis added). In her own life, Beth Macy knows what it meant for her father, for once, to have “a coveted union job” painting a new mall and the resultant pride his family felt “every time we drove past the shiny white automotive bay doors he’d painted.” Citing the work of Nicholas Jacobs and Daniel Shea, Macy writes that “rural places have lost 48 percent of their jobs in agriculture, forestry, mining, construction, transportation, and production since 1970.”4 The Trade Adjustment Assistance program to retrain workers dislocated by NAFTA was, Macy writes,
so minimal and poorly executed that only a third of the displaced even participated, and most who did ended up making far less than they had in the factories.
Urbana’s schools are carrying the burden of parental unemployment and consequent family breakdown.. But what about preventing the debilitating effects of job loss? Think what a Job Guarantee or Jobs for All Program would have meant to the victims of globalization and free trade: one that offered good, decent–paying jobs and necessary retraining–before heroin and fentanyl and meth. And even now, think of the benefits for children, families and communities of a true entitlement to employment, living wages, requisite job–related benefits and whatever training and rehabilitation are necessary. And in adopting trade and employment policies, think about considering foremost the lives of American workers and their families.
Notes:
1. Macy refers the reader to Gary K. Clabaugh, “The Educational Legacy of Ronald Reagan,” U.S. Department of Education, 2004, files.erid.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ684842.pdf.
2. Similarly, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof writes: “…my hometown in rural Oregon saw factories and sawmills close and meth arrive–and so many families have been bathed in pain since.” New York Times, December 21, 2025.
3. Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth–Century America, Harvard University Press, 1998, 89–90.
4. Nicholas Jacobs and Daniel Shea, The Rural Voter, The Politics of Place and the Disuniting of America, Columbia University Press, 2024.