Paper girl A memoir of home and family in a fractured America

Review by Booklist Review

Award-winning author Macy (Dopesick, 2018; Raising Lazarus, 2022), now based in Virginia, returned to her small hometown of Urbana, Ohio, for this memoir. She focuses on how the town has changed since her childhood in the seventies into a "poorer, sicker, angrier, and less educated place" and on her struggles to get along with siblings and old friends who've remained in the area and moved decidedly to the political right, while Macy has moved to the left. Covering 2023 and 2024, the author shares her memories of growing up poor with a hardworking mother and an alcoholic father while zooming in on several people in the present, including a trans student trying to make a go of it in college, a truant officer attempting to cover a county where students increasingly don't show up for school, and Macy's ex, a former journalist transformed from "the most liberal person I knew" to a "right-wing racist and antisemite." With compassion and energy, Macy mourns the decline of mainstream journalism and makes a plea for more funding for public education, particularly college education.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

---

Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Journalist and Dopesick author Macy poignantly interweaves her personal history with that of her decaying hometown in this perceptive account. Raised in blue-collar Urbana, Ohio, which teemed with factory jobs and good schools in the 1970s and '80s, Macy survived poverty and an alcoholic father with the help of the public library, family friends, and a job delivering newspapers that helped her pay for college. Returning in the 2020s to care for her ailing mother, Macy witnessed Urbana's "backward mobility," characterized by opioid addiction, declining educational opportunities, and rampant loneliness. As she recalls episodes from her complicated childhood, Macy attempts to diagnose the causes of Urbana's current dysfunction, considering the corrosive effects of cable news, social media, and crumbling unions on the community that helped her achieve her own imperfect version of the American dream. As she watches old friends become consumed by anti-immigrant rhetoric, including an ex-boyfriend who helped stir up attention around Haitian immigrants in Springfield during the 2024 election, Macy concludes that "the answer to our epidemic of loneliness isn't to seek solace in conspiracy theories; it's to participate in real life with other human beings." Timely, clear-eyed, and empathetic, her insights provide a welcome salve for a festering social wound. It's a sobering journey into America's splintered heartland. Photos. Agent: Dorian Karchmar, WME. (Oct.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

---

Review by Library Journal Review

Growing up in Urbana, OH, in the 1970s wasn't utopian, but Macy (Raising Lazarus) got a good education and a valuable support network out of the Rust Belt town, a stepping stone to a career in journalism. In recent years, Urbana (like many small U.S. towns) has become an angrier, poorer, socially and politically fractured place; Macy's book, combining journalism with memoir, seeks to understand its decline through interviews with residents, whose current lives in Urbana she contrasts with her own. For example, the Pell grant Macy received in 1985 was enough to fund her college career, while a current community college student with a Pell grant still can't find reliable housing or transportation. Macy's first job was delivering the local newspaper, a key source of civic connection. But today, Urbana lacks for local journalism, which Macy links to political outcomes; 91% of U.S. counties that voted Trump in 2024 had no source for local news. She draws a logical line showing how disinvestment in journalism and education, among other factors, create disenfranchised communities bound only by racism, xenophobia, and hatred of common scapegoats. VERDICT Well researched and befitting her journalism background, Macy's memoir is raw but full of resilience and hope for the future. Recommended for all collections, especially in small towns.--Toni Cox

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

---

Review by Kirkus Book Review

A small-town success story returns to her Ohio home to take account of profound changes. "It's not as if Urbana had ever been utopia for me. I was among the poorest kids in my class, and I felt it." Macy, the author ofDopesick and other bestsellers, made her way out of poverty in the 1980s through a college degree funded by grants that largely no longer exist. Her latest nonfiction narrative chronicles her return home to try to see what would happen to a kid like her today, coming face to face with "the unprecedented forces that were actively turning the community I loved into a poorer, sicker, angrier, and less educated place." Her reporting goes deep and wide, including her family members, old friends and teachers, and many new acquaintances. Central among them is recent high school graduate Silas James, one of the teens she identifies as "a modern-day me," though Silas is trans and has more abuse and trauma in his background than the author. Also memorable are an ex-boyfriend, once the most liberal person she knew, now a strident voice on an array of far-right talking points; on the other end of the spectrum is Brooke Perry, a deeply committed attendance officer whom she accompanies on harrowing rounds to try to get kids into school in a climate where education has lost its place as a tentpole of the American dream. The author does not shy away from tough personal stories, writing about a niece who was abused as a child by her stepfather. Macy goes into the toughest interviews with "trauma-informed advice," reminding herself that connecting about shared interests and noncontroversial topics will keep these conversations going much longer--though sadly, it often doesn't change the end result. Black-and-white photos of the interview subjects add an important dimension to the story. By practicing the basic journalistic acts of listening and observing, Macy continues her noble work as a truth teller. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

---