Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America

"Yes. It’s a really different approach. This is a person well-versed in writing about other people and communities and systems. It was exciting to have her bring that accomplished reporter’s eye to a place she loves, which is her hometown of Urbana, Ohio. I feel lucky to have read it because she brings that skillset to an American town in crisis, and to her relationship to this town and to the people and her family. It all comes together. That’s why I really appreciated this book: that you can have a memoir that is also deeply researched, meticulously reported, and has a big way of thinking about how systems interact. Macy tells her own story about how she had opportunity through a Pell Grant. There were all these things that she could access. She was a paper girl who delivered newspapers, then eventually she wrote for newspapers, and so she took on this economic mobility. Decades later, that’s not what young people are facing. In fact, there’s so much against them. It’s a tragedy. She ends the book writing about an ex-boyfriend that she had, someone she cared about deeply, who ended up a spokesman of anti-immigrant rhetoric. Anti-Haitian in particular. In that area, there was that notion they were eating dogs and cats—he was part of that. He has since passed away. She asks: How does that happen? What are the stories that we tell ourselves that make us believe such horrible lies about each other. Previously she’s written nonfiction, reported books like Dopesick . But this is different, from a very personal perspective. Yes. And this book starts with a death too. Because it was after her mother’s death that she came back to this town and set off on this journey. At the end of the book, there is a call to action. Like: let’s not lose hope, let’s do things. What can we do to change the story? I saw her last night, actually, and she is running for Congress ."