Macy Gets It: A Review of Beth Macy's Memoir PAPER GIRL
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Beth Macy
Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America
Penguin Press / 2025 / 368 pages / $32 USD/ $42CD
Reviewed by Kristie Helms Nettles / June 2026
Beth Macy has built a career reporting on the outside forces tearing at the seams of American life. Her bestselling book Dopesick pulled back the curtain on the Appalachian opioid epidemic, and Raising Lazarus followed those who were trying to pick up the pieces. With Paper Girl, she turns her investigative lens on a more intimate story, that of her own upbringing in the small Ohio town that made her. The result is a deeply personal reckoning with political polarization, economic decline, and the slow erosion of community. Paper Girl is a memoir that doubles as a portrait of rural America in crisis. What distinguishes the book is the multiple registers of Macy's voice—the candor of personal reckoning braided with a journalist's commitment to grounding every claim in evidence.
Macy grew up poor in Urbana, Ohio, during the 1970s and ’80s. Her father was an alcoholic, and money was tight. As a girl, she delivered the local newspaper, hence the book's title, to earn money for clothes and school trips. But despite her family's struggles, Urbana offered something vital: a functioning economy, strong public schools, and a civic fabric that held people together. With the help of teachers, extended family, and a Pell Grant, Macy left for college and built a successful career in journalism. She never forgot where she came from, but she did leave it behind.
As someone who grew up in a similar time and background (right down to the alcoholic father, money troubles, and my own journey into newspaper reporting), I read Paper Girl hoping I'd finally found another person who gets it.
Macy gets it.
The catalyst for the book is Macy's return to her hometown of Urbana as her mother's health declined. What she found unsettled her. She writes, “Something was rotting beneath the surface of my postcard-cute hometown. It wasn’t just that kids like me weren’t going away to college anymore; many weren’t even finishing high school.”
The town, once a stop on the Underground Railroad, was now a place where Confederate flags flew openly and MAGA signs dotted every other yard. Champaign County voted nearly three to one for Donald Trump in 2024. The local newspaper, once the “civic glue” she had delivered door to door, had all but disappeared. Schools were losing students to chronic absenteeism, and poverty, addiction, and mental health crises had deepened beyond anything she remembered. Paper Girl is Macy's attempt to understand what happened to the town after she left.
The book weaves memoir with journalism, braiding Macy's childhood recollections with interviews she conducted over two years of return trips from her home in Roanoke, Virginia. She talks to family members, old friends, teachers, and strangers, many of whom hold views radically different from her own. She approaches these conversations with what she describes as “trauma-informed advice,” reminding herself that connecting over shared interests and noncontroversial topics will keep people talking longer. It doesn't always work, but the effort itself becomes one of the book's quiet arguments: that showing up and listening, even when it's painful, is an act of civic repair.
The personal stories Macy shares are striking. There is her older sister, Cookie, described as a “righteous Christian warrior,” who considers Macy's son's marriage to another man an abomination. The sisters’ relationship becomes a case study in how political and religious divides can crack even the closest family bonds. She also writes of her ex-boyfriend, someone whose politics once mirrored her own, who has become a vocal opponent of Haitian immigrants in nearby Springfield, repeating the debunked claim that Haitians were eating residents’ pets during the 2024 presidential campaign. These stories of people from her past are told alongside that of Silas James, a transgender teenager and recent high school graduate navigating rural Ohio, whose journey into adulthood offers a window into the challenges facing the next generation.
Macy does not reduce any of these people to easy stereotypes. Of Cookie, Macy writes, “My relationship with Cookie had always been shallower, easier, and a lot less intense. She had an infectious laugh and could be hilarious, once driving us around Mom’s neighborhood in Liza’s convertible, blasting, “I’m Too Sexy” on the stereo. We had visited over the decades at Mom’s house—once a year, usually, around the holidays—and we exchanged cards and small gifts. But no one in the family ever mustered the language to talk in depth about Cookie’s husband’s abuse of her kids and the ripple effects it had on all of us.”
Her description of Cookie is filled with grace and a sense of sisterly love, even as her deep frustration is evident. Her ex-boyfriend is not simply dismissed as radicalized; she tries to understand what led him to where he is today. And Silas is written as a full human being, not just a symbol. Several critics have drawn a contrast with J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, which argued that the people still stuck in rural poverty were mostly to blame for their own situation. Macy finds that the roots of polarization stretch back decades and that Democrats and the political left share some of the blame, even as she identifies Trump-era politics as a powerful accelerant. Since the book's publication, Macy has announced a run for Congress, and Paper Girl has taken on an additional role as campaign memoir—just as Hillbilly Elegy eventually did for Vance.
Where the book is perhaps most valuable is in its reporting on the systems that have failed places like Urbana. Macy documents the collapse of local journalism, the defunding of public education, and the disappearance of the kinds of government assistance, such as the Pell Grants, that propelled her own escape from poverty. She writes of Brooke Perry, a school attendance officer, on Perry’s attempts to get children into classrooms in a community where education is not held in the esteem that it once was.
The statistics Macy assembles are sobering: rising homelessness, plummeting literacy rates, and stagnant wages set against a relentless increase in the cost of living. She goes on to write, “Thirty million poor and low-wage people didn’t bother to vote in the 2024 election, in part because nobody talked to them. The non-voters, alas, included Silas, who explained the day after, ‘I just feel like all politicians say extremes when they’re running, but it’s much harder and complicated to get what they want done.’”
There are moments when the book's attempt to be both memoir and sociological investigation can begin to feel unwieldy, as Macy shifts between intimate family history and sweeping analysis of misinformation, the mental health crisis, and the politicization of public education. Not every thread receives equal development, and the transitions between the personal and the political can occasionally feel abrupt.
The work's structural ambition, though, is what ultimately gives it power beyond simple memoir or a work of investigative journalism. Macy understands that the personal and the political are not separate entities and that we're all products of the cultural and geographic context surrounding us. The same forces that turned her ex-boyfriend into a conspiracy theorist are the forces that closed the factories and gutted the schools. The same economic despair that deepened her sister's retreat into rigid religious certainty is the despair that has driven unprecedented spikes in addiction and mental illness. By holding the intimate and the systemic in the same story, Macy reveals how thoroughly intertwined they are.
Paper Girl is not without hope. Macy identifies people doing meaningful work—including educators, advocates, community organizers—and she outlines both large- and small-scale ideas for improving conditions in rural America. The book's final section, “Showing Up,” is itself an argument that presence and persistence matter. Macy explains, “The answer to our epidemic of loneliness isn’t to seek solace in conspiracy theories; it’s to participate in real life with other human beings, including those we don’t know.” The work of reconnection is slow and unglamorous but not futile.
Named one of Barack Obama's favorite books of 2025 and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Paper Girl raises questions that feel especially urgent in today's polarized atmosphere. How do you keep a relationship with people whose worldview has become unrecognizable? How do you love a place that seems determined to destroy itself? And what do we owe the communities that raised us, even when they've changed beyond recognition? Macy doesn't attempt tidy answers, but the courage and empathy with which she poses the questions make Paper Girl essential reading for anyone trying to understand what has happened to the country, and to us.
Kristie Helms Nettles grew up in Possum Trot, Kentucky, and forged a career in New York City and Boston before settling closer to home in Nashville, Tennessee. A former crime reporter turned financial marketer, her debut book, Dish It Up, Baby (Firebrand Press), was a Lambda Literary Finalist. Nettles is an MFA candidate in creative nonfiction at the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University. She’s currently working on The Difference: A Memoir of Motherhood, Murder, and the Women Who Can't Choose—a feminist redneck reckoning with who gets to escape and who doesn't.