I’ve known about Beth Macy for a very long time. A number of her books take place in the geography of my childhood. She is friends with some of my dearest friends. She wrote about Appalachia’s burgeoning opioid epidemic in DOPESICK, and specifically about its impacts on my hometown of Charleston, West Virginia, in RAISING LAZARUS. I’ve often felt as though Macy’s work offers me a road map for understanding the current conditions at home–a place I struggle to recognize, even though I spent my entire childhood there. So, being given the chance to interview her for the Pittsburgh Review of Books (PRoB) was one I jumped at.
PAPER GIRL is a researched memoir. It explores both the terrain of Macy’s childhood and the present-day conditions in Urbana, Ohio. As she does so deftly in all of her books, Macy attempts to surface the set of overlapping conditions that create Urbana’s present-day struggles with unemployment, chronic absenteeism in schools, and fractured families. She offers to answer questions about what happens to small places and the people who live in them after decades of disinvestment in higher education, public education, local news, and labor unions. And more importantly, how that disinvestment plays out for the young people in these communities. At the same time, Macy also charts how her relationships with friends and family have shifted amid deep polarization.
What has happened to home? What has happened to us? And where do we go from here? These are the questions that Macy tackles in PAPER GIRL. We had a discussion together in advance of her visit to Pittsburgh to speak as part of the Pittsburgh Arts and Lecture Series.
Neema: When our mutual friend, Robert Gipe (author of The Canard County Trilogy) and I were talking recently, he said that he thinks about your books as kind of the literary equivalent of the HBO show The Wire.
Beth: God, I love that show.
Neema: To me, it made so much sense when he said it that way, because you take individual people’s stories, and then, you layer on a systems analysis, which is what The Wire did, too. Let me peel back the layers to show you how systems are coming down on these individuals. But I didn’t learn a systems analysis growing up in a rural place, and I would doubt that you did either. I think when you grow up in small places you’re often taught that your success or failure is based on what you do or don’t do. And that’s where it ends. Personal responsibility is the thing, and there’s nothing outside of that that’s impacting your trajectory.
Beth: Because you’ve never been anywhere else. You don’t even know. My parents would have never known that phrase, systems analysis.
Neema: I wouldn’t have known it growing up either. I had to go to grad school and take a sociology class. But it made me wonder: How did you both come to that kind of thinking, and then how did you make the decision to make this kind of thinking central to the writing that you do?
Beth: All of my books, except for this last one, have really generated from on-the-ground reporting that I did as a Roanoke Times reporter. I worked at the Roanoke Times for 25 years, and so you look at Factory Man, which is about the aftermath of globalization, directly grew out of a five-part series I did as soon as I got back from the Neiman Fellowship in 2010. [It was] about how and why did this community, just an hour south of us, have the highest unemployment rate in the state for over a decade. Because we would always do a factory closing story, we’d send somebody down there, but we’ve never, like, added it up. And that means now we’ve lost half of our jobs! Now, X number of people are having to commute out of the county, or even out of the state for work, and SNAP has tripled, and we have the highest opioid prescribing rate.
Because of how I grew up, I had a heart for the underdog. I could relate to those dislocated workers, because my mom was dislocated many a time, and she would be our only source of income.
And then it was like, “Oh shit, what’s she gonna do?” And she would always scramble and figure something out, and Grandma next door would help. And Dad would be at the bar. But when I’m working on Factory Man and this dislocated worker gives me her cell phone number, and then she says, “Oh, it’s about to be cut off. Here, you better take my mom’s,” or to worry about if they’re gonna shut off our power, and it’s the blizzard of ‘77. I knew what that felt like.
So I have always known that you had to start on the ground level. When I went back to write Factory Man, I didn’t start with the factory CEOs, or even the factory man himself. I started with the dislocated people.
I knew the family story would be really interesting and a compelling, almost kind of dishy way to bring people into the story, because it was a big family feud. So then I started talking to people who knew them and who had worked for them. I interviewed babysitters. Housekeepers, you know. I studied their family tree going back 100 years, because they were famous; they had a governor of Virginia in their lineage. By the time I get to that level where I’m interviewing the Bassett CEO. I know a lot more about his town now than he does.
But at the same time, the Great Recession was happening. Pew did a survey where they showed how many stories were written about the recession, and who the main sources in those stories were. Only 2% of all those stories interviewed the people that were most affected by the recession. And that’s because most of the people writing the stories grew up middle or upper middle class. Many of them went to the Ivy League. Our news is produced in New York and DC and big cities. And they don’t have a clue about places like Martinsville, Virginia, or Urbana, Ohio.
Neema: Early in the book, you describe it as a sort of love letter to Urbana. That really resonated for me, but I don’t know if it is a kind of love that people who don’t grow up in small places understand. That love of a place that doesn’t always love you back can be a very complicated feeling. And I wondered how your feelings about home changed, even as you were writing the book. Because I felt like, as I was going through, we were moving between love and grief. And that grief, especially as we got towards the end of the book, grief took up a lot of the analysis.
Beth: A friend from the Neiman program was interviewing me a couple weeks ago. And I think because she knew me, she said, “Beth, what was the predominant feeling you had when you were back in your hometown?” I said it was kind of exciting at first, and then after about 6 months–I would usually get an Airbnb for 7 days– I realized that I would start going home early. I’d start going home on the sixth day, the fifth day.
I paid for a lot of days I didn’t use.
I think it was pain by the end. It was pain. Because by that point, I had gotten really close to Silas, to Maddie, to these sweet kids who were just having a hell of a time.
I would be in a hurry to get home to my husband and my dog. My friends that think the way I think. And would never say anything offensive about my gay kids. Wouldn’t dream of it.
Neema: Something that really comes through in your book, and that I think is harder and harder for people to see, is that people can be more than one thing.
Beth: Yeah, and the question, as Joy puts it so well, is, how do we love each other beyond what we can’t agree with or understand? That’s really the question of the hour. I think… I was listening to The Daily yesterday, and they had the results of the latest poll that they had conducted. It was taken right after Charlie Kirk’s murder. But it was showing that the divisions in our country are now more concerning to Americans than even the economy. 64% of people think we’re too divided to solve our problem. And that tracks.
Neema: I think that that empathy and sense of alliance really comes through in your writing, especially in the way that you write about young people. Particularly the way you see Silas, and see both you and Silas’ stories overlap, and also the ways in which Silas’ story feels 100 times more complicated and more challenging than the conditions you grew up in.
You start with Silas’ broken-down car. 30 years ago, the car might have been the biggest problem, right? Or the car and the family dynamics might have been the biggest cause. Now, for a kid like Silas, you have an anti-trans policy picture which is also coming down on them in these ways where nobody deserves to be made the scapegoat for an entire country’s problems. Navigating that on top of the complexities of growing up poor and growing up in the context of heavy trauma, it’s so hard.
Beth: Golly, I know, I’m so proud of that kid. He’s killing it right now. The first time I heard about Silas, they said, he’s the drum major, and we didn’t have a drum major. I was the band president, so I was kind of the leader, and he was the leader because he was the drum major, and that’s the person that literally leads them onto the field. And they said, “He was really poor, like you were, but a really good student, like you were.” He had been abused and been in and out of various guardianships. And he had been homeless, couch surfing most of his junior and senior years. Both of his parents were unstable. I had one stable parent, right?
That’s why I say at the end, if you lined up a map of our trauma, you know, mine would just barely cover his pinky. He has so much more trauma, and yet, his resiliency is incredible. And he’s not alone, there’s lots of kids like him.
Silas also has the resiliency to reach out for help. That was another thing I really loved, because he was close to his band director, I was close to my band director. We both were good at finding people to fill in for family roles. I was the original Eddie Haskell. All my friends’ parents loved me. They would be fighting with their own children, and I’d be like, Helen, what can I do for you today? Because, Helen made me lunch every single day in high school.
Neema: What would happen if you did a Pew Research survey about how often young people are the center of the story? How often is their perspective used to inform the analysis that’s happening? They are the most affected and the least covered.
Beth: Growing up is hard for everyone. My kids didn’t have to worry about a roof over their heads, or two parents that loved them. We started saving $200 a month, because we were a teacher and a reporter. We were pretty paycheck to paycheck, but our financial guy said, when Max was born, if you save $200 a month, then we’ll invest it. We’ll get you a 529. We started saving for college the month the first kid was born, because it was so important to me.
But you think about somebody like Silas. He can’t even think about the future in that way. I just was chasing what I thought was the best story with him. We ignore those stories at our own peril, because those are the real stories. When somebody makes a big change like that. Doing good for society. Whenever anybody does the unexpected thing and wins, it’s a good story. But to overcome that many hurdles…
Neema: Your ability to parallel your experience with the Pell Grant with a young person’s today experience with the Pell Grant felt really powerful. To say, yes, this thing still exists, but the impact that it can have has been radically diminished.
Beth: Silas could have gotten a Pell Grant and gone to Bowling Green State University, like me. But he couldn’t have, because it would only cover 30%, whereas he gets two full scholarships thrown at him for Clark State Community College, but they’re only to be used for tuition. Whereas my Pell paid for everything and allowed me to move away from home. Which got me out of this world where my dad felt threatening to me. Where it was depressing. I needed to get out of that space and have some healing.
Neema: You have a root cause analysis, and you’re clear about the sources of the problems that exist in Urbana, and they live on both sides of the aisle. And they live, in large part with a deep culture of greed in this country that has been used to exploit poor and working people for centuries. I was trying to imagine people I know at home agreeing with that analysis, because so often their analysis is that we are where we are because of trans people. Or because of Muslim people, or because of immigrants. I don’t know that we’re gonna get to a shared agreement on the root cause with everyone at home. But a question I’ve been thinking about is: Is there a world where it doesn’t matter if we agree about the root cause if we can figure out where we go from here?
Beth: I was just talking to a friend of mine down the street who’s a writer, too, and he was saying, “I’ve read all your books. I know that addiction is a chronic relapsing disease, but when it’s my brother, who’s hurting my dad, I can’t stand it.” I said, “I know, me too. I can’t stand it in my own family. But that’s why we need stories like this, right? Maybe you can’t deal with your crazy cousin, but I can.”
That’s why it’s so important to tell these stories, to begin to try to understand, and try to break through the brainwashing. My editor wouldn’t let me use that word in the book. But that’s what I think it is. They, of course, think you and I have been brainwashed as well.
Neema: I think it’s a question of who is offering a narrative to explain what has happened here. When I think about home, I think lots of people are grieving. Grievance and grief aren’t the same thing. What happened to our home? We were living in relatively healthy places, and they’re not healthy anymore. We can agree that when we look, this is not okay.
Beth: Yeah, as Joe Solomon says in Raising Lazarus: “That fucker down the street stole my bike. That’s who I’m gonna blame.”
Neema: I don’t think the left has provided any meaningful narrative to poor people in rural places or small places where they say we can agree that the conditions that you’re experiencing are not okay, and that we are responsible for them. And we can offer you a path through this.
Beth: Even the good things Biden did, he didn’t explain them to Rural America. No. And the right explains. They lie, but they explain. Yeah, and punching down on trans people is just beyond the beyond, you know?
To make trans people the scapegoat is just ridiculous. But there are these suburban moms that are just so afraid because they tell them that they might come out for your kid. They might make your kid get an abortion. Those lies that I heard in public meetings in Urbana. We’re gonna become the abortion capital. And when you go back to them and say, hey, that’s not happening now that we’ve protected abortion in Ohio, they say, “Oh, give it 7 to 10 years.” Nobody ever goes back and fact-checks them. Just like nobody went back and said, Martinsville now has lost 50% of its workforce.
You’re right, it’s exactly… it’s providing the narrative, and we don’t have enough narrative. Because of what’s happened in the digital space, and the lack of regulation, and in the usurping by big, huge, powerful corporations of our information ecosystem, we don’t have those stories.
Neema: No. I mean, books like yours are doing that work. Right?
Beth: We’ve got to try.
Neema: I think there’s some through lines between Raising Lazarus and this book. You start to map some pretty interesting possibilities in Raising Lazarus of ways that people found common ground. I wonder if you feel those through lines coming through in the world of PAPER GIRL. Are there pockets of opportunity?
Beth: I always come back to this, what this activist, Sue Ella Kobak, in far southwest Virginia and Lee County said. The answer is always community. You know, she didn’t say, comma, stupid, but it was implied in her tone.
She’s right.
Do you remember in the book where the Johns Hopkins scholar said the Trumpiest people live in the poorest places, but they’re not the poorest people. They’re ones that are still voting. And they’re really mad about their poor neighbors in the way the house values have gone down, and the fact that maybe their factory can’t staff. So they think the answer is to punch down, rather than to build up schools, or mental health services, substance use disorder services.
My heroes are pointing the way, it’s just, will our policymakers pay any attention and figure out how to emulate what they’re doing. We have to elect better people. Since I wrote this book, I’ve become an activist. I go to these rallies outside of our no-show congressman’s office every Monday. I’ve joined this group called Do Good Virginia, which is trying to help. The groups that are being the most impacted by Trump’s harmful policies. I packed Narcan kits on Monday. I mean, I never thought I had time for that. It’s so much fun, and I’ve met people from all walks of life.
We are starting to take this tattered old quilt and stitch it up. It’s a slow process. But it can be done, and you’re seeing now that. These new alliances, these new patches can lead to bigger things, like running better people for office. Better news.
We’ve got to change that narrative. We have to change the narrative, and we have to change who’s in power in those places, too.
One last note: Shortly after we spoke, Macy announced her candidacy for the 6th Congressional District in Virginia.
