Autorentext

Beth Macy

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**An Instant National Bestseller • Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award • One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of the Year • Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker and Vanity Fair

"There couldn’t be a timelier book . . . searingly poignant, essential . . . Macy follows closely in the footsteps of . . . Barbara Ehrenreich and Tracy Kidder, combining memoir with reportage, a raft of sobering statistics and, most uniquely in our era, a willingness to engage in uncomfortable conversations." —The Washington Post

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.

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.

Leseprobe
It was June 2023, and Silas James had just graduated from Urbana High School, forty-one years after I wore that same insignia. It was a moment that was supposed to be the launching pad for his new identity and new life, as my graduation had been. It was meant to signify a break from the family chaos that had permeated most of his eighteen years.

Two full scholarships were all teed up and waiting for him at a community college in a nearby city. He planned to become a welder. Companies need welders, he knew. The nation needs welders. The pay was more than anything anyone in his family, save a few drug dealers, had ever made. And this was legit.

For Silas, manipulating metal and gas wasn’t just a way to get the hell out of Urbana, Ohio; it made him feel like an artist.

He’d been so nervous about starting college that when I asked if he took a test-​drive
to Clark State in Springfield, Ohio, the week before, he shot back: “One hundred percent, I drove an hour away just to practice.”

After his first class, he called me from the cafeteria: He’d just ordered a chicken quesadilla and a strawberry smoothie, and he was thrilled. He loved that he’d flashed his student ID to the cafeteria workers, he loved the sliding-​scale health center, and he adored Toni, the mentor they’d assigned to him as a first-​generation college student. “Everything you can think of, they have it here,” he marveled. He’d even made a potential new friend in a classmate who wore ear gauges the same size as his.

And the fact that the college webmaster had posted his photo on the home page during the first week of school? Silas had never imagined that when he was homeless, during long stretches of his junior and senior years of high school, nearly dropping out several times.

But on the third day of class, the head gasket blew on his Saturn Ion, a beater that was older than Silas by three years. The car was a goner. The next day, a relative he was staying with was injured in a car accident and left the hospital with a concussion so severe she required
around-​the-​clock supervision. Which is how he ended up a college dropout before the end of his first semester’s first week. The family organizing and caretaking had fallen to Silas, as it often did.

Even his graduation had been a bust. He found himself ruminating on his grandparents, who’d spent four days driving from Texas on the back of a single motorcycle for his commencement, only to skip the ceremony because their vision prevents them from driving at night. He hadn’t seen them since the eighth grade, and at the restaurant they took him out to for lunch, they barely managed three sentences. “They seemed burdened to be here,” Silas told me.

He thought about his favorite high school counselor, Mrs. Flowers, who came to his graduation party at the city park and handed him a card with $100 cash as the skunk of his relatives’ weed enveloped her. His older sister had gone camping and skipped the festivities altogether. He thought about his truancy officer, Brooke Perry, who’d pulled strings to get the school district to send a van to pick him up from one of his several temporary homes outside the county.

For years, teachers and counselors had been praying and pulling strings for Silas to graduate, extending shoulders and untold hours of support and sometimes even their spare bedrooms. For his own safety and mental health, they wanted him to get the hell out of Urbana.

As drum major, Silas wasn’t just the leader of the Urbana High School Marching Band; he was also the student who spent every lunch period in the band director’s office, sometimes crying, sometimes joshing with Mr. Sapp, but always plotting ahead with his favorite teacher about the next band routine, the next test, the next step of his life.

He’d pursued the drum major position his sophomore year with a single-mindedness that impressed Mr. Sapp. To become the one who led the marching band onto the field and directed songs and twirling routines, there were two requirements: You had to be able to fully execute a back bend, with the feathers of your hat plume kissing the ground; and you had to fit into one of the two drum major uniforms that Mr. Sapp, with his dwindling band budget, could afford to buy.

“He took it very seriously,” Mr. Sapp told me. “He went to all the clinics, and he practiced and practiced and practiced.”

The small uniform fit Silas’s 120-​pound, five-​two frame as if it were tailor-​made. Though his legal name was still Elizabeth James, he’d become trans and changed his name during junior year. When we met in early 2023, he was eighteen and just beginning to give himself testosterone injections. He picked the name Silas because it sounded like “silos”; he’d always been surrounded by farmland, always reveled in the way the grain storage towers punctuated the rolling midwestern landscape. His mom chose Cole, his new middle name, from a list of names he’d sent to her in jail. In his heart, he wo…