Beth Macy

And I was really stymied by that.

And so I decided after mom's death to figure out what, if anything, was left of my family, my hometown, and my country.

Yeah, about two years of going.

I would go home about for a week, a month, and like scores of interviews.

Absolutely.

So my mom was feisty, funny, gritty.

I was the midlife accident, the youngest by far of four.

And by the time I came along, my dad was a not very functioning alcoholic.

And so it was really on mom to do everything, to work.

She would work at Grimes Manufacturing, which was the nation's premier maker of airplane lights and navigational lights and

And she would work those jobs until the economy would tank periodically and she'd get laid off and then she would have to pick up under the table work like babysitting and waitressing really badly, she said.

And all the things that the folks that I later interviewed for books like Factory Man were doing.

And so, I mean, that was one reason I was drawn to tell the story of what was left behind by globalization.

because I had grown up with that same kind of financial precarity.

And as I started going back to Urbana for the book, I realized through interviews that the middle class, which had been very hardy, the schools which had been very good when I was growing up,

weren't so strong anymore.

And so as I began to peel the layers of the onion, I started to realize that people weren't showing up for work.

People weren't sending their kids to school.

The school folks were saying, you know, it's really, really hard to educate a large portion of the students because first we have to teach them what one person said was how to human.

Oh, verbally abusive many times, physically abusive a couple of times.