Paper Girl

From one of our most acclaimed chroniclers of the forces eroding the fabric of our shared life, her most personal and powerful work: a reckoning with the changes that have rocked her own beloved small Ohio hometown

The town of Urbana, Ohio was not a utopia when Beth Macy grew up there in the 70’s and 80’s, certainly not for her family. Her dad was an alcoholic who only fitfully worked, and people called him the town drunk, which hurt, as did their poverty. But Urbana had a healthy enough economy, and there were middle class kids at school whose families became her role models. People in Urbana were proud of their schools, and the library, and the history of their town, an important stop on the Underground Railroad. Macy loved Urbana, and though she was able to make it to college on a Pell Grant and then follow a career in journalism that took her far away, she still clung gratefully to the hometown that helped raise her. On the surface it was still picture-postcard cute.

But as Macy’s mother’s health began its final descent in 2020, on more frequent visits home to Ohio, she couldn’t shake the feeling that her town had dramatically hardened in ways she couldn’t process. Beth grew up as the paper girl, delivering the local newspaper, which was like civic glue, mirroring the community back to itself. Now there was no local paper, no paper girl, and precious little civic glue. Yes, a lot of the work that once supported the middle class had gone away, along with all that went with it. But that was an old story that didn’t begin to cover the forces turning her town into a poorer and angrier place. High school graduation rates were plummeting as absenteeism soared in the public schools and in the workplace. A mental health crisis gripped the small city, along with a litany of other pathologies. Urbana’s pride in its institutions was withering: parents were opting to home school, or transferring their kids elsewhere, in record numbers. Even more painfully, many of her own family members and old friends had gone down the rabbit hole of conspiracies like QAnon, and worse. What happened to Urbana?

This was not an assignment Beth Macy ever wanted to take, but she felt she had no choice. Two years ago, she began to return regularly, to deploy everything she’d learned to figure her hometown out. The result is an astonishment, a book that takes us into the heart of one specific place and through it brings into focus in a new way our most urgent set of national issues.

Paper Girl is a gift of courage, empathy and insight, a profoundly generous act. Beth Macy has turned to face the darkest corners in the shared life of her family and community, people she loves wholeheartedly, even the ones she struggles now to like. And in doing so, in facing the truth—in person, with respect—she has found sparks of human dignity that she has used to light a great signal fire, of warning but also of hope.