The New Yorker:

In her new book, Beth Macy returns to her home town of Urbana, Ohio, using it as a ground zero for understanding right-wing radicalization.

By Grace Byron

Ever since Donald Trump was first elected President, in 2016, a slew of books have attempted to reckon with the growing divide between urban and rural populations in the United States. Few do so as deftly as Beth Macy’s new book, “Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America.” Throughout her career as a journalist, Macy has covered rural poverty and corporate greed. Her 2014 book, “Factory Man,” followed a Virginia furniture-maker’s fight against Chinese offshoring; in 2018, she published “Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America,” an investigation of the opioid crisis that was subsequently adapted into a Hulu series. If “Dopesick” captured the rural discontent that was festering before 2016, then “Paper Girl” might be seen as its spiritual sequel, focussing on how Trump’s Presidency left the nation even more fragmented. This time, Macy gets personal, using her deeply red home town of Urbana, Ohio, as a ground zero for understanding right-wing radicalization. Rather than dismiss her religious sister or her conspiratorial ex-boyfriend, Macy digs deeper, excavating a topsy-turvy world where many people still believe that Trump won the 2020 election. It can be easy to become disillusioned with the other side, to abandon all notions of mutual respect and understanding. It’s much harder, as Macy writes, to “scramble for hope fiercely, the way a farm girl wrestles a muddy sow.”

Macy is the paragon of liberal brain drain: she left Urbana in 1982, when she went to college, and subsequently moved to Virginia. Her relationship with her family is fraught, and not just because of her liberal politics; religious animosity, personal grudges, and class resentment all play a part. After “Dopesick” was published, to critical acclaim, Macy became a media darling, further distancing her from her home-town roots. (The Hulu show, which features two lesbians struggling in coal country, didn’t help matters.) But there was also a history of abuse and addiction within Macy’s family, and she struggled to get them to discuss it openly. The author never imagined that she would return to live in Urbana, let alone write a book about it, but she embarked on the project after the 2020 election, deciding to figure out “what happened to my country, my hometown—and my family.”

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