Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Dave Davies, Jr. She followed with two books on the opioid crisis and grassroots efforts to fight it. Her latest book continues her focus on working people in rural America, but this time through the lens of a personal memoir.
Chapter 2: What challenges did Beth Macy face growing up in Urbana, Ohio?
Macy grew up in the town of Urbana, Ohio, where she says she was one of the poorest kids in her class and felt it. She writes that her childhood had its share of chaos, addiction, and utility cutoff notices, but that she managed to escape poverty and forge a career in journalism because she got to college and completed a four-year degree. Her book is a deeply reported look at the Urbana she left.
where the factory jobs have largely disappeared, creating economic pressures that lead to family dysfunction while social supports and educational opportunities have eroded. She found it hard to communicate with family members and old friends who've embraced conspiratorial thinking.
The more time she spent in her hometown, Macy writes, the more she recognized forces that were turning the community she loved into a poorer, sicker, angrier, and less educated place. Beth Macy spent many years reporting for the Roanoke Virginia Times and has written four previous books, three of which were New York Times bestsellers.
Chapter 3: How did Beth Macy's family dynamics influence her career?
Her book Dope Sick was made into a Peabody and Emmy Award-winning Hulu series on which Macy served as an executive producer and co-writer. Macy's new book is Paper Girl, a memoir of home and family in a fractured America. Well, Beth Macy, welcome back to Fresh Air.
Thanks for having me, Dave.
You know, most of your books have been these deeply reported studies on the impacts of many things on working people, deindustrialization, the opioid epidemic. This book is also deeply reported. It's not just your memories, but it's a look at your family and the community you grew up in and left and how they've changed. What decided to make you take on this project, which is more personal?
It was really a moment that I had with my sister, who is 13 years older, at our mother's deathbed. And it happened to be the Saturday after the election of 2020, the day they were counting the votes. And my mom was in hospice. She was 93. She wasn't expected to live, you know, but a day or two longer. And
Chapter 4: What prompted Beth Macy to write her memoir 'Paper Girl'?
And the hospice nurse's phone pinged and she goes, oh, they're calling it for Biden. And my sister, who had never been political before, but who was very evangelical, sort of shouted out. wait, it's fraudulent. He won't win. And I just was astonished. I didn't realize how much we operated in different information ecosystems. But there were some clues.
As I was driving home more often to see my mom, I noticed things like in Urbana, which was once We were very proud about it being an important stop on the Underground Railroad. I would now see Confederate flags flying. And I noticed that a lot of my friends were posting really political things on Facebook.
And even my own brother, who I was very close to, unfriended me at one point during Trump's first administration because of, quote, all the liberal crap I post. Now I post, I'm a journalist, I post fact-checked articles, mainly from the Washington Post and the New York Times, some of which are articles that I've written myself. 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.
And it took you a couple, three years to do this, right?
Yeah, about two years of going. I would go home about for a week, a month, and like scores of interviews.
Okay, so let's talk about this. You grew up in Urbana, Ohio. It's a rural town, although most people weren't involved in agriculture. Your mom, it seemed, was the rock of your family. Tell us about her.
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.
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Chapter 5: How has the opioid crisis affected communities like Urbana?
And so, I mean, that was one reason I was drawn to tell the story of what was left behind by globalization.
Yeah.
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.
Going back for a second, you said your dad was an alcoholic who did not do so well as his later years went on. And he was abusive to you at least once, right?
Oh, verbally abusive many times, physically abusive a couple of times.
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Chapter 6: What were the effects of deindustrialization on Macy's hometown?
It wasn't a great environment to grow up in with the exception of my mom and my grandma Macy next door who literally owned our house and kept a roof over our heads.
But, you know, when I talked earlier about the hollowing out of the middle class now, what was different back then is I had these friends whose parents were wonderful to me, who would give me rides home from sports practices and band practices and who would buck me up when I was feeling low.
And also because I had this incredible grandma next door who taught me how to read and write before I went to kindergarten. I had the confidence when I got to public schools and met these fantastic teachers to know that I might be poorer than the rest of the kids, but they weren't necessarily smarter than me. And I think that really helped me.
There was a family that made you lunch almost every day for a year or something like this?
Helen Wellman. It would be egg salad, tuna salad, chicken salad, and then we'd go back to egg. And her daughter, Tanya, would take me home for lunch every day. And every little heartbreak I ever had, Helen was my counselor.
So it really was a community. The book is called Paper Girl, which has a double meaning. I mean, you delivered papers as a kid to your neighbors, and you then spent many, many years working for a daily newspaper. When did you start that?
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Chapter 7: How do conspiracy theories impact relationships in small towns?
Tell us about that, delivering papers.
Yeah, I started helping the Kellenberger boys who lived catty corner from me. They were a couple of years older than me. And I was like, this is a pretty good gig.
Chapter 8: What role do Pell Grants play in access to education?
And they'd share their pay with me. And I loved getting a little bit of pocket money. And then I always wanted to buy my own clothes because I hated the things like my mom probably couldn't afford nice clothes. So I So then I got my own paper route so I could buy my own clothes and I could save up for the field trip to Washington, D.C., which would be my first time crossing state lines.
It was almost like I thought the atmosphere would change as the Greyhound crossed the state line. And, you know, I just worked for things and I loved working. And the great thing about growing up in Urbana then, when it had a solid middle class, was I would deliver in my neighborhood to all kinds of people, lower middle class, middle class, upper middle class.
It was possible to grow up right around the corner from a wealthy person and to get to take advantage of public things that all kids got to take advantage of then.
You managed to go to college, to Bowling Green State University, and this was clearly a huge thing in your life. You write that had you been born a decade later, you probably wouldn't have been able to go. Why?
Because when I left for college in 1982, I remember filling out the financial aid paperwork. My mom helped me. Our family income was $8,000 a year, which put us in the lowest quartile. And the Pell Grant is need-based, so we qualified for the full freight. So that means I got my state tuition paid for, my room and board paid.
My textbooks were paid for, and I always had two or three work-study jobs so I could have pizza and beer money just like everybody else and not feel like a food stamp recipient in the line at Whole Foods. And it changed my life. It just totally changed my life going to college. Not that I made – great money as a newspaper reporter for many, many years. It was paycheck to paycheck.
But what it did is it took me out of the environment I was raised in, and it put me in a peer group of people, including my husband, who were solidly middle class and not having to deal with addiction, trauma, utility cutoff notices. And it was just a peaceful environment that I hadn't before experienced.
You described your mom driving you to college that freshman year. And she knew that this was going to change things, that you weren't going to be coming back, didn't she?
I think she did. I've got this funny picture of her sort of half waving, half smiling, pretending to cry, saying goodbye to me. And I remember saying on the way up, I was so nervous. She could probably hear my stomach, you know, making weird noises. And, you know, about half asked her to turn around and take me back because no one in my family had been to college.
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