Urbana, Ohio, was not a utopia when our guest today grew up there in the ’70s and ’80s. But, despite her family’s poverty, Urbana had a healthy economy and thriving schools. Though she left for college on a Pell Grant and then a faraway career in journalism, she still clung gratefully to the place that had helped raise her.
But as Macy’s mother’s health declined in 2020, Macy returned to find much of the work that once supported the middle class had gone away, and she saw her hometown had become a much poorer and angrier place. In her latest book, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America, Macy decides to figure out what happened to Urbana in the 40 years since she’d left. The resulting book takes us into the heart of one small town in America, bringing into focus our most urgent set of national issues.
Beth Macy is a Virginia-based journalist who writes about outsiders and underdogs. Her work has won Nieman Fellowship for Journalism at Harvard, a J. Anthony Lukas Prize, and an L.A. Times Book Prize. She is the author of three New York Times bestselling books, including Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America, which was made into a Peabody Award-winning series for Hulu.
