"Paper Girl" | Reviewed by William Winkler

Journalist Beth Macy, born and raised in the small city of Urbana, Ohio, was able to attend college on the support of funding by a Pell Grant. For 25 years she was a reporter for the Roanoke (Va.) Times. During her years with the paper she developed a keen eye for the changes in America, particularly its smaller cities and rural areas.

The result of those observations was a series of books detailing the effects of globalization on the non-urban sector as well as the nationwide opioid crisis engendered by the family who owned a pharmaceutical company driving the demand for the drugs.

In 2020 Macy’s mother, who still lived in Urbana, began to experience failing health, prompting the author to spend more time returning to her central Ohio hometown. During those visits she noted with alarm the dramatic decline in those characteristics that had made Urbana a strong, if not ideal, place to grow up and raise a family.

Gone was the vigorously reported local newspaper. Attendance and graduation rates from the previously vaunted public school system had dropped precipitously. Drug use, formerly thought to be a “big city” problem, was taxing already waning community resources.

Macy’s most recent book, “Paper Girl,” is a memoir focused on her family as well as her friends, many of whom still live in Urbana. The recounting of her past and present interactions with these people is unflinching in its honesty and often painful to read. It is through her description of these conversations that she lays out the factors she believes are leading to the polarization of not only small-town America, but the society as a whole. The loss of local fact-checked journalism, the insistence of Christian nationalism on diminishing the impact of public education, and thegrowing emphasis on the individual, rather than the family or the community, as the center of the culture, are the factors she cites and documents.

Many readers will find this book to be an uncomfortable read. The author herself holds out only cautious optimism that the trends she describes, and trends that seem to be accelerating in the present day, can be reversed.

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