Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America
Beth Macy
Penguin Press, 368 pages
Published October 7, 2025
Childhood in Urbana, Ohio, was a tough road for Beth Macy — her dad was an alcoholic and the family lived in poverty. Encouraging teachers and a Pell Grant made college possible, and a degree from Bowling Green University offered a path forward. Macy’s thriving career in journalism and stable marriage to a teacher led to a comfortable middle-class lifestyle, situated in Roanoke, Virginia, an “urban blue dot in a sea of rural and red.”
When Macy returned home in 2020 to care for her mom in hospice, she barely recognized her hometown. Paper Girl is Macy’s attempt to understand the widening gulf between her world and that of old friends and family. Siblings and nurses who tenderly cared for her mom grew enraged by the “stolen” election … an old boyfriend prepped for the end times … and their class reunion organizer spread QAnon conspiracy theories.
In the words of an old friend, “These are super nice people who, if a neighbor’s sick, they’ll go and mow their grass and do their farm chores … But they feel threatened because the world’s changing in ways they can’t understand. They worry they’ll be left out and what limited success they do have is going to be cut off. They see things through a lens of fear and scarcity.”
Macy is curious and compassionate in her reporting, giving voice to those who still live in Urbana — teachers, guidance counselors, the high school band director, a truant officer, and numerous students and graduates. She gently probes into family estrangements, such as a sibling who failed to protect her daughter, Macy’s niece, from childhood sexual abuse, and the difficulties of maintaining relationships with family members who view Macy’s LGBTQ kids as “abominations.”
She writes with genuine affection and recognizes (without criticism) that the mobility required to succeed in America (e.g. get a degree/move to where the jobs are) often runs counter to the deep roots and relationships many rural Americans have with their hometowns. Readers may hear her quietly cheering for the young people she features, like Silas and Liza, and for the Urbana Youth Center that supports them.
The challenge with memoirs like Macy’s is to permit them to open our eyes without engendering pity and condescension. As many have argued, the patronizing attitudes of “liberal elites” have led to many of our divisions.
Perhaps the greater challenge is that memoirs like this one leave us wondering, “What can we do?” Paper Girl is not a policy recommendation, and yet Macy clearly has ideas. She contrasts her experiences as a Pell Grant recipient with those of the young people who currently struggle to attend community college (while caring for younger siblings/addicted parents and unable to afford reliable transportation). She describes the grant as a way of “pushing back on the false narrative that poor people weren’t worthy of investment.” The government has whittled away at the program since 2011, curtailing the number of young people who benefit. If we are to rely on community colleges to provide affordable education and job training, we need to get real about the other barriers.
Macy, whose career in journalism started with a delivery route as a “paper girl” for the Urbana Daily Citizen notes that this struggling local paper is no longer a daily. With increasing distrust in the “mainstream media” and dwindling sources of local news, Americans often rely on unreliable internet sources. The problem is clear — the solution, not so much.
While Paper Girl stirs up these frustrations, we can also allow it to deepen our respect and empathy for those who encounter personal and systemic barriers to their flourishing. Beth Macy’s gracious reporting does most of the heavy lifting for us, should we choose to open our hearts to receive the stories of Urbana, Ohio.
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