‘Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America’ by Beth Macy

Beth Macy’s characterization of life today in her Ohio birthplace “might feel familiar, like an update of JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy ,” said in The Atlantic . In fact, the vice president grew up an hour down the road. “But unlike Vance, who blamed much of his hometown’s misfortune on its residents,” Macy returned to Urbana, Ohio, an economically distressed city of 11,000, eager to listen to and learn from her former neighbors about why so many friends no longer talk to one another and why so many embrace the politics of Donald Trump. In Paper Girl , her new hybrid of memoir and social portrait, the Roanoke, Va.–based author of Dopesick and Factory Man “does what most opinion essays don’t even try to

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