From one of our most acclaimed chroniclers of the forces eroding America’s social fabric, her most personal and powerful work: a reckoning with the changes that have rocked her own beloved small Ohio hometown

Urbana, Ohio, was not a utopia when Beth Macy grew up there in the ’70s and ’80s—certainly not for her family. Her dad was known as the town drunk, which hurt, as did their poverty. But Urbana had a healthy economy and thriving schools, and Macy had middle-class schoolmates whose families became her role models. Though she left for college on a Pell Grant and then a faraway career in journalism, she still clung gratefully to the place that had helped raise her.

But as Macy’s mother’s health declined in 2020, she couldn’t shake the feeling that her town had dramatically hardened. Macy had grown up as the paper girl, delivering the local newspaper, which was the community’s civic glue. Now she found scant local news and precious little civic glue. Yes, much of the work that once supported the middle class had gone away, but that didn’t begin to cover the forces turning Urbana into a poorer and angrier place. Absenteeism soared in the schools and in the workplace as a mental health crisis gripped the small city. Some of her old friends now embraced conspiracies. In nearby Springfield, Macy watched as her ex-boyfriend—once the most liberal person she knew—became a lead voice of opposition against the Haitian immigrants, parroting false talking points throughout the 2024 presidential campaign.

This was not an assignment Beth Macy had ever imagined taking on, but after her mother’s death, she decided to figure out what happened to Urbana in the forty years since she’d left. The result is an astonishing book that, by taking us into the heart of one place, brings into focus our most urgent set of national issues.


Paper Girl is a gift of courage, empathy, and insight. Beth Macy has turned to face the darkness in her family and community, people she loves wholeheartedly, even the ones she sometimes struggles to like. And in facing the truth—in person, with respect—she has found sparks of human dignity that she has used to light a signal fire of warning but also of hope. - (Penguin Putnam)

Booklist Reviews

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. Copyright 2025 Booklist Reviews.

Library Journal Reviews

Bestselling Macy (Dopesick) writes about her childhood in western Ohio in the 1970s and '80s and how her hometown changed over time to a place that fractured into isolation, conspiracy theories, and polarization. Prepub Alert. Copyright 2025 Library Journal

Library Journal Reviews

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