Beth Macy Explores how to Bridge Divides in Families Fractured by Angry Politics

At a time when one out of every five American families are divided over politics, journalist and author Beth Macy wonders, had stayed in her hometown of Urbana, Ohio, would she have become a Trump voter like the rest of her family? In her new book, Paper Girl, a Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America, Macy deploys her formidable reporting skills to ask a basic question: Did I change? Or did my hometown change?

In her visits home, Macy recounts how a once progressive ex-boyfriend became an angry right-wing conspiracy theorist, and high school reunions marred with fights over QAnon and vaccines. She follows a young man named Silas, who, like her, grew up poor. But whereas Macy had a mother who loved her “roughly but well” and public policies that gave her the opportunity to go to college and move up and out, Silas has none of that.

Like many small towns across the country, the middle class in Urbana has been hollowed out. Rural areas, she notes, have lost 48 percent of their jobs since 1970, when free trade policies and globalization sent many of them overseas. In her town, once the stable jobs went, opioid addiction set in. Graduation rates dropped. Foster care tripled. The share of people relying on public nutrition benefits soared.

At the same time, the local news crumbled. One study by Northwestern University’s Local News Initiative found that nearly 40 percent of all local U.S. newspapers have disappeared, leaving 50 million Americans with no reliable local news source and subject to the vitriol spewing out of the internet, where lies spread about six times faster than truth.

“How,” one of Macy’s friends asks in the book, “do you love past what you don’t agree with or can’t understand?”

Paper Girl follows Macy’s journey to try to find out.

The following is a transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity.

Brigid Schulte: Your book is just beautiful. It’s a heartbreaking portrait of family and divided lives. It’s so of the moment. Let’s start with why—why did you want to write this book and why now?

Beth Macy: As my mother was starting to get sick, she was diagnosed with dementia around 2015, we started going home more. And I just started noticing the changes in my hometown. It wasn't like it hit you over the head. But it was like, “Why are there Confederate flags hanging in a town that once heralded itself as an important stop on the Underground Railroad and has a soldier of a victorious Union soldier in the middle of the town square?”

Really, the initial thing was wondering, “How did my siblings and I end up so ideologically different?” Hillary Clinton made her unfortunate “deplorables” remark, and months later, just as I thought I was in a sweet conversation with my brother-in-law, I would say, “Hey John, how you doing?” He'd go, “Deplorable.” And want to start [fighting] about it. Then my brother, Tim, unfriends me on Facebook because of all the “liberal shit” I post. And, I promise you, I was posting fact-check articles from the Washington Post and the New York Times. It was just becoming clearer and clearer that they were not at all in the same news silo that I was in. It was very much a case of two Americas: one “elite” people who had gone to college, and the other, everyone else. Well, only 36% of Americans have a bachelor's degree. So if we're going to turn this around, we've got to put more emphasis on public education again.

Schulte: You write a lot in the book about how education was what propelled you up and out of your hometown. And how, because of policy choices, that’s not as likely to happen anymore.

Macy: I consider myself really lucky to have come of age—I’m 61—at this brief moment in time when it was possible for a poor kid to get a four-year degree for free, via Pell Grants. And now, as in the case of the young man I write about in the book, the “young me” of the book, Silas James, a poor kid going to a four-year school, is only going to get about 30% of it paid for.

Had I been born just 10 years later, I wouldn't have been able to leave town. I wouldn't have been able be as productive as I am. I wouldn't have been as happy or as successful. And I may have fallen into patterns that have bogged my family down for many, many years, including addiction.

So I have a little survivor's guilt about it. I have a lot of curiosity about it. But also, I love my family and I just like, “Is this the end of us?” That was the driving question behind the book. And how do we begin to have those conversations?

Schulte: You write about some really difficult moments trying to bridge that divide with your family. How has your family reacted to your book? And where are you now with your relationships?

Macy: My sister Cookie and I were together a few days before Mom passed away in November, 2020. We were in her hospice room, and the nurse said that they’d called the election for Biden. Cookie said, “You wait. It's fraudulent. He won't win.” She’d posted some pro-Trump things on Facebook, but I'd never heard her talk like that. I was just shocked. And I wrote a piece about it for the New York Times. They only left it open for comments for about an hour, but there were hundreds.

So when I interviewed Cookie for the book, I used the same trauma-informed interviewing that I used for my books about opioids: be an active listener, start with what you have in common, which in our case is our mom, who is so hilarious and so feisty and funny and like no one else I’ve ever known in the world. I brought some old family photos. I brought some letters mom had written that she was mentioned in, and we just went from there.

I think we have to start finding those little cracks. Like my brother. My brother totally comes around by the end of the book and we're friends again. He comes to see my non-binary child Sasha's band perform. He drives eight hours for their album release in Charlottesville. Tim is now a superfan of the band on Facebook. I’m really grateful to my brother for his tenderness and his support.

My mother's the comic relief and the grit of the book. She asked me, maybe around 2015, when she was still pretty with it, “What’s your next book about?” This is when I was writing Dopesick, so I said, “I’m writing about the heroin epidemic.” “Heroin?” she says. “You should write a love story.”

In some ways, this book is my love story to my mother who instilled in me a love of education. She proofread my first papers. She drove me to college, even though she really didn't want me to go. She was proud of me. We would clash sometimes. She wrote me a poem called “Easter Greeting to my Mean Daughter.” There was just no one like her. And here she is helping me even now by giving the reader some lightness amidst all this darkness. I consider this book a huge tribute to her.

Schulte: In your book, you weave together not only what’s happening to your family and your town, but you show how these lives were shaped by policy decisions on the state and national level and by our turbulent national political discourse. What struck you most?

Macy: I originally thought the book was going to be more about the decline of news because I was a paper girl, and a long-time newspaper reporter. I think the decline of fact-based news and the barrage of wealthy billionaires getting rich off standardless practices online is a big part of why we're so divided.

As a reporter, when I have a question, I just always start from the ground. Here, I started with teachers. And what I started to see came as a real shock: how the value in public education has plummeted, and how Christian nationalists have really driven this homeschool movement, now the largest educational movement in the country. The deregulation of homeschools, which just happened a couple years ago, enables people to pull their kids out and they no longer even have any checks on what their children are being taught. There was even a Nazi homeschool in Ohio.

The few people in the middle class who do still have kids in Urbana City schools pull them out and are able to, because of statewide policies like open enrollment, and send their kid to an even more rural school with higher test scores, and that money goes with them. So that hurts the kids left behind. There are tons of charter schools and, and private schools, and all that money goes with those kids too.

An unintended consequence of that is the less-educated folks are left behind, some of them suffering from mental health and addiction. Those who aren't mentally or physically able to get their kids up in the morning, or who simply don't, can then say they're homeschooling to avoid truancy charges.

All these things are a shock to the people in my hometown, because the local newspaper there no longer exists and there’s been no reporting on it.

If you were driving through Urbana, you would think it was really cute, and it is really cute. But a block away or two blocks away from the city center, you start to see underbelly really quick: kids riding around on bicycles in the middle of the day who aren't in school, and a truancy officer running from one end of the county to the next, and they need about 10 of her. I think that's a story we're not telling enough.

Schulte: You write a lot about how more people know what Sean Hannity says on Fox News than they know what’s going on in their own town halls, or with that truancy officer. That’s happening all over the country.

Macy: The Roanoke Times has maybe four reporters. It had over 60 when I came there in 1989. There are some nonprofits that are starting up. Here in Roanoke we have Cardinal News. I’m on the advisory board. They have more reporters than the Roanoke Times. We also have the Roanoke Rambler, which gives a deep dive into what’s happening in the city. I’ve also started writing a Substack to write about how the federal budget cuts are impacting people locally. But we need more, and we need everybody to support local news. We’ve just got to start to stitch back these institutions that are so frayed.

Schulte: That’s so true. And if we don’t have a local media telling those stories of people and families left behind or overlooked in our own communities, then we can’t understand the turmoil of the current political moment.

Macy: Low-wage people don't have a voice in our press. The Pew Research Center looked at all the articles that came out right after the 2008 recession. Only 2 percent of those articles featured people who were impacted by the recession. Everything was from the point of view of companies and CEOs. That was shocking to me. So it's possible to be in a big city and never have to go home to a place like Urbana, or drive through a place like Martinsville, Virginia, where Factory Man is set and understand that wow, in Martinsville, half of the jobs have gone away.

Not just the furniture factories and the textile mills, but also the places where the former factory workers spent their money—the mom and pop diners. And now people are having to drive their clunker cars to North Carolina for work. That's a direct aftermath of NAFTA and China joining the WTO in 2001 and Clinton policies.

And we did nothing for the people left behind. We had this very watered-down program called TAA, Trade AdjustmentAssistance, that was supposed to re-train these workers for the knowledge economy. Only one third of the workers even took part in it. You had to be in school full-time to get the benefit. Well, how are people going to pay their mortgage? And even those who did go through the program ended up getting service jobs. We designed that program badly. We don’t bring the people and those who are most impacted into the conversation.

We have to understand where we are. I hope this book will help.

Schulte: So give us some hope here, Beth. If the goal is to help all families flourish in the United States, how do we get from here to there?

Macy: We can't just be out there, like the Ohio gun owner in my book stating, “Ammo up for the end times, train daily, eat red meat.” No. We've got to participate in our communities and begin to elect better people who are fighting for really important things, like public education and childcare and a raised minimum wage.

And we have to start really connecting with each other. I took my own advice. After I finished the book, on President's Day, we had a rally [in Roanoke] outside of our congressman's office, who refuses to have a town hall meeting and who has voted against all these things I'm for.

And we've been showing up every Monday at rallies. For some people, this is the first time they’ve ever protested in their lives. Suddenly, we’re building alliances. They start bringing food to deliver to food pantries, and they start organizing, collecting diapers for a diaper bank. I met somebody who talked me into packing Narcan kits with the Harm Reduction Group on Mondays. We have to start building these bonds back. Who would be against giving low-wage moms diapers and formula and wipes?

We've got to get out and register new voters. So I have put my journalist hat aside and am on my way to being an activist now. I’ve got to walk my talk.

We are the solution. People are the solution. Community is always the answer.