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Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America is a 2025 non-fiction book by American author Beth Macy. The book blends memoir with journalism, and follows Macy, who grew up poor in Urbana, Ohio, as she returns to her hometown in an attempt to discover how and why she has become politically divided from family and former friends who remained there. She uses Urbana as a microcosm for the challenges facing rural areas in America, and how those challenges have contributed to political polarization throughout the nation.
Macy attempts to approach the issues with an open mind, and conducts interviews with family and townspeople, many with conflicting views from her own, as well as subject experts. She determines that the current political climate of extreme divisiveness owes much to the policies of President Donald Trump, but concedes that the roots of the issue go back much further and that Democrats and the left share the blame.
Paper Girl was generally well received, with The Washington Post saying that "there couldn't be a timelier book". Other critics praised the book's combination of research and personal insight, as well as Macy's willingness to listen and empathize. Also noted was the contrast between Macy's work and other contemporary takes on Appalachia, particularly that of JD Vance's memoir Hillbilly Elegy. Former president Barack Obama listed Paper Girl among his favorite books of 2025.
Macy became a journalist following graduation. She wrote for the Roanoke, Virginia-based newspaper The Roanoke Times and was a recipient of Harvard University's Nieman Fellowship. She began writing books, the themes of which have echoed her journalism work in examining "rural poverty and corporate greed", while seeking out signs of hope in bleak situations. Her book Dopesick, which explored the effects of the opioid epidemic on the Appalachia, was made into a Hulu miniseries.
After returning home in 2020 to care for her sick mother, Macy was affected by the proliferation of Confederate flags, MAGA supporters, and conspiracy theorists in the Ohio town that had once been a stop on the Underground Railroad. For Paper Girl, she sought to understand how she had become so politically divided from family and old friends who had stayed in Urbana – a city that voted nearly three to one for Donald Trump in the 2024 election, and which has been experiencing a sharp economic downturn. She spent two years making trips there from her Roanoke home, conducting "scores of interviews" of family, friends, and other townspeople, while also researching the causes of political polarization.
Macy reflects on the difficulties she faced as a child growing up disadvantaged but notes that a strong community as well as government assistance in the form of a Pell Grant helped to provide her with a good education and opportunities thereafter. Much of that infrastructure that helped her out of poverty no longer exists, Macy observes, and she seeks to learn why.
She attempts to approach the topic with a willingness to be open to other viewpoints, and speaks with a number of people with worldviews very different from her own. She seeks to learn why political disagreements have reached the point where friends and family have ended decades-long relationships. An interview with Macy's sister reveals that her sister believes Macy's son's marriage to another man to be an "abomination", for instance, while an organizer of a high school reunion dealing with political tensions receives a death threat and resigns their position. Macy contemplates the part she's played: "What was my own role in these breaches," she writes, "and were they beyond repair?"
One of the Urbana residents who Macy connects with is Silas, a recent high school graduate attempting to attend college and earn his welding certificate. Silas, who is Transgender, is having to be a parent to his siblings following their removal from his addict mother's care, while attempting to earn enough money to attend school with unreliable transportation. Macy sees hope in Silas and others of his generation who are seeking to better themselves even while being discouraged from higher education by their parents, who believe college will make their children liberal and not return home.
In addition to interviews with townspeople and family members, Macy also talks to a number of experts who provide insight into the broader themes of political polarization. A historian, for instance, informs her of George Wallace's influence on the spread of the ideology that "government is bad" and its contribution to the erosion of public faith in the institution. Macy places much of the blame for the widening divide between the right and the left on the policies of Donald Trump, but admits that liberals, the media, and the Democratic Party are also complicit. By ignoring the challenges facing rural communities (Macy terms the Democrats on the 2024 campaign trail as "living in Kamala Harris la-la land"), the left only deepened the wedge between the two sides. Macy writes that members of the left are often oblivious to their role in the schism; in response to photographer Sally Mann's insistence that the right has no reason to be upset with the left, Macy tells her that "hurt dogs bite".
Jessica Grose wrote in The New York Times that Paper Girl, while "sad and sobering", does offer both large- and small-scale ideas to improve rural conditions, particularly for its children. Grose also notes that Macy is running for Congress in Virginia's 6th district in 2026. The reviewer for The New Yorker, meanwhile, thought Macy naïve in placing most of the blame with Trump, and believed another of her conclusions – that by limiting opportunities for higher education, the super rich are removing the "ladder of upward mobility" from the reach of lower-class hands – to be her more sound argument.
Former American president Barack Obama placed Paper Girl among the top three of his favorite books of 2025.
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