AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Writer Beth Macy grew up in Urbana, Ohio, a place that was rich in diversity and community, even if she grew up in what she describes as a poor, dysfunctional family.
BETH MACY: It was a rough growing-up, but I had one stable parent, which I really want to point out - a grandmother next door that taught me how to read. It was like my own private Head Start. And I had really, really good teachers.
CHANG: Macy knew people on almost every block of every street. Her community helped raise her out of poverty and into a college education.
MACY: One mom made me lunch every single day of school. Another friend took me to school every day. Yet another friend brought me home from softball practice. Which allowed me to do all the things other college-going kids were going to do.
CHANG: But she has watched Urbana go from a town with stable factory jobs and good schools in the 1970s and '80s to a place bearing the heavy weight of unemployment, addiction and plummeting graduation rates. Macy is now an award-winning author and journalist. And for her new memoir, "Paper Girl," she returns to her hometown to understand why Urbana has transformed so dramatically, and what Urbana can tell us about this country. I asked Macy, when did she first notice the changes in her hometown?
MACY: I first noticed it in my family. Just a lot of division. And we never used to talk about politics, but around when Trump was elected, my brother, Tim (ph), unfriended me on Facebook 'cause of, quote, "all the liberal crap you post." And we had been very close. And then kind of the pinnacle moment happened at my mom's deathbed in 2020. It happened to be the Saturday after the election, when I was sitting with the hospice nurse and my evangelical sister, who had previously never spoken of politics. And the nurse's phone blinged, and she goes, oh, they're calling it for Biden. And my sister said, you wait. It's fraudulent. He won't win. And Mama's (ph) literally laying in her death bed going (imitates labored breathing). You know, she could die at any moment. And I just thought, oh, my goodness, what has happened? I had noticed in my hometown, which was a hotbed of abolitionist activity and an underground railroad haven, but there were now Confederate flags flying.
CHANG: Yeah.
MACY: And after Mom died, I just thought, what has happened to my family, my hometown and my country?
CHANG: Right.
MACY: And so I decided to go back and try to figure out...
CHANG: Yes.
MACY: ...What had caused the changes.
CHANG: That was a central question. And it wasn't just a shift in political attitudes that you were trying to explain. You write that unprecedented forces were actively turning the community I loved into a poor, sicker, angrier and less-educated place. And I want to talk about that with respect to a particular person who started your book - Silas James. I mean, you talk about how stark the contrast was between the Urbana you grew up in compared to the one that Silas grew up in. Can you talk about how your paths seem so similar in some ways, but they were so divergent?
MACY: Yeah. So I did a lot of reporting just to find a, quote, "young me" for the book, and talked to teachers and counselors. And I said, I want a promising poor kid. They all pointed to him. You know, he had grown up in a family with addiction. His father had died of a drug overdose, his mother was in and out of prison, and he didn't have one stable parent. And so what I saw in Silas' story was just a whole nother level of trauma and abuse. He had been abused by a caregiver at a young age.
And that all sort of dovetails once I did the research and I saw that, you know, foster care had tripled since 2015 in Urbana. The number of emergency calls for mental health crises had gone up by a factor of nine in the 40 years since I had left. And yet Silas, kind of like me, managed to grab onto these teachers who were real beacons in his life that sort of made a way for him.
CHANG: And another divergence between you and Silas - you got a Pell Grant to attend college. And now, kids like Silas, they don't have that same chance because the purchasing power of the Pell Grant has radically declined, right?
MACY: That's right.
CHANG: How do you see that affecting the educational opportunities of poor Americans now?
MACY: Oh, it's so huge. I mean, basically, we have taken a four-year college degree away from poor kids or even lower-middle-class kids. And we've said, either go to the community college or take out loans, which is really dire for even middle-class families, right?
CHANG: Yeah, yeah.
MACY: So when I went, the whole thing was paid for. Even my books, room and board, tuition. I got work-study jobs so I could buy pizza and beer just like everybody else. And when Silas went, he had all of his tuition covered, but because he went to a community college, there was no money for him to, like, move out of his house and live nearby the college. And the college was an hour away, which meant he had to have reliable transportation. And I watched that poor kid for - he dropped out the first week 'cause his car died. And then once he got re-enrolled, I watched him go through five clunker cars in the course of a 10-month program.
CHANG: I can't imagine. Well, when you were young, you had a paper route, hence the title of this book, "Paper Girl." And you've since had a decorated career as a journalist, and a lot of your book deals - with the spread of misinformation and growing contempt for journalists, can I ask you, like - 'cause I think about this question - what does it feel like to be a member of a profession that many people in your own hometown, many people in the country, probably distrust?
MACY: It feels painful. My first friend, I've known her since kindergarten. She conducted my mom's funeral. This is how much I love her. She's the one who gave me a ride to school every day.
CHANG: Wow.
MACY: She said, I hate the media. All of this is the media's fault. And I said, Joy (ph), I am the media and when I write a piece for The New York Times or The Washington Post, it is fact-checked to the nth degree. And at one point, she raised her voice to me and she said, who fact-checks the fact-checkers? And I said, Joy, facts are facts. Like, you know, I was just astonished to hear that. And she - just like my sister Cookie (ph), the one who said the election was fraudulent, she lives in an entirely different news ecosystem than I believe in. And it felt personal when people were saying...
CHANG: Yeah. Absolutely.
MACY: ...You know, you lie.
CHANG: Well, then let me ask you a question that a lot of us here at NPR are asking. How do we get people to care more about fact-based journalism? How do we persuade the people we're losing to come back and seek truthful information?
MACY: Well, I think we need to pay more attention to what's happening in these rural areas, right? More stories about them. We need to start to build back legacy media institutions. I mean, where I live, in Roanoke, Virginia, when I first came to work at the paper in 1989, we had 60-some reporters. Now they have...
CHANG: Wow.
MACY: ...Six.
CHANG: Oh, my God.
MACY: So think about all the things that aren't being covered.
CHANG: Yeah.
MACY: At the same time, you've got these, like, really hardworking, sort of demoralized final few reporters, and then people attack them.
CHANG: Right.
MACY: It's just terrible. But I think we have to keep telling the stories. And one of the things I came away with from the book is we have to start with our families. As hard as it is to have these conversations, you know, that is maybe the people we'll have the best chance with talking across the divide.
CHANG: Beth Macy's new book is called "Paper Girl: A Memoir Of Home And Family In Fractured America." Thank you so much, Beth. It was such a pleasure to talk to you.
MACY: Thank you, Ailsa.
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