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

In November 2020, Macy sits at the hospice bedside of her mother, Sarah, after the latter had a stroke during the week of the presidential election. Unlike her weeping siblings and niece, Liza, Macy sees her mother’s death as a release from dementia’s indignities. Sarah became the family breadwinner after Macy’s birth in 1964, often intercepting her husband Ted “Shaky” Macy’s paychecks before he could drink or gamble them away. Ted, a World War II veteran and junior-high dropout, grew abusive by Macy’s teens and skipped her graduation. A therapist later helped Macy process the neglect, noting that being an outsider sharpened her writing.

The women held the family together through poverty and addiction. Sarah once foiled the repo man by keeping Ted’s truck idling overnight. Macy’s single fond memory with her father is singing Kenny Rogers in his ugly, hand-painted car. Her mother worked at Grimes Manufacturing, founded by Warren G. Grimes, a paternalistic industrialist who kept Urbana’s wages low by blocking interstate construction, prompting Honda to build elsewhere in 1979 and stunting local growth.

Champaign County, founded on Shawnee land, was a key Underground Railroad stop. Richard Stanhope, formerly enslaved as George Washington’s valet, was an early settler. Conductor Udney Hyde sheltered a man named Addison White, later recruited by Frederick Douglass for the Union’s first Black regiment. A Civil War monument, “The Man on the Monument,” stands in the town square, but this abolitionist history was ignored in Macy’s youth, as was the 1897 lynching of Charles “Click” Mitchell. Biracial classmate Mark Evans’s efforts to publicize this history have been rebuffed; his parents, Johnny and Peggy Evans, endured decades of discrimination for their interracial marriage. Trump-era tensions have fractured Macy’s high school class.

Macy reflects on her childhood in Urbana. Her mother endured sexual harassment at Grimes. A childhood friend recalls that her parents viewed Macy as unruly, and the friend’s mother once accused her of stealing. In response to another neighbor’s recollections, Macy’s sister, Terry, defends their father, noting that alcohol addiction is a disease. Macy finds a 1974 letter her father wrote from rehab. Her mother had an affair with a man whom her father later assaulted. Despite chaos, her mother was a rough but loving presence who taught Macy financial survival and helped her secure medication when she was a poorly paid young reporter. Macy’s friends loved her mother.

After Cookie’s second divorce, she and her three children moved in with Sarah. Sarah’s extreme Depression-era frugality helped the family survive and was a longstanding trait; she had paid for Macy’s birth on layaway. As Macy left for college, Sarah acknowledged her self-sufficiency, while Terry helped financially with her receptionist’s salary. Macy recalls that her family valued reading and watched Walter Cronkite nightly. She herself became a paper girl to save for a trip to Washington, DC, where a wealthy classmate mocked her home’s poverty. Her grandmother helped fund the trip. Senator Claiborne Pell’s grant program created Macy’s path to college. After Ted’s death, Sarah married Gene, a kind widower, achieving financial stability for the first time.

Macy credits her Pell Grant-funded Bowling Green State University degree as her portal to middle-class stability and a decades-long marriage. Research shows bachelor’s degrees protect against “deaths of despair” and increase lifespan by eight and a half years. However, Urbana’s college graduation rate is only 16%, and police calls for mental health crises have increased ninefold since she left. Macy recognizes her disconnect from a hometown where many now distrust college. Donald Trump capitalized on this resentment. Former Pell aide Sarah Flanagan describes the rural fear that college turns children into liberals.

By the late 1990s, tuition had doubled while Pell Grants’ value fell. President Bill Clinton’s tuition tax credits aided the middle class more than the poor, while NAFTA and China’s WTO entry accelerated manufacturing losses. Economist Angus Deaton later recanted his support for offshoring. Grimes Manufacturing was absorbed by Honeywell as a result of these changes. Democratic strategist David Axelrod admits the party misrepresented free trade’s benefits. Meanwhile, federal retraining programs failed, and anger over trade helped Trump win in 2016. Macy calculates that she could not have afforded college if she had been born a decade later. Senator Pell regretted that his grant program was not made an entitlement.

After the 2020 election, at Sarah’s bedside, Macy and Cookie avoid politics. Cookie’s abusive third husband caused a family rift; she chose a church revival over Macy’s wedding. She later disapproved of the TV series based on Macy’s book, Dopesick. Their brother, Tim, unfriends Macy on Facebook over her liberal posts. The family once celebrated her journalism career but now distrusts mainstream media, preferring Fox News and Newsmax. Terry’s husband, John, a Fox devotee and Hillary Clinton critic, was unaware of the local opioid crisis until seeing an overdose at a library.

Macy notes that the rise of cable news and the internet has replaced substantive debate with partisan rancor. Local newspaper collapse contributed to this by fostering national identities over community bonds. She recalls writing about Salena Sullivan, a poor Black student who earned a Harvard scholarship, and the way that the story inspired others in Salena’s community of Roanoke to help. These kinds of deep-dive investigations are increasingly uncommon in local papers. Macy’s editor at The Roanoke Times, Carole Tarrant, was laid off when Berkshire Hathaway bought their paper. Current editor Brian Kelley works 70 hours weekly as the newsroom shrinks from 125 to six reporters. Iowa publisher Doug Burns, whose family paper folded, warned a Facebook executive that social media’s damage could spark civil war. Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act shields platforms from liability as the outrage economy replaces community-building news. In West Virginia, Macy finds old newspaper boxes repurposed for naloxone distribution. Her life has paralleled the decline of public trust in institutions.

In her final years, Macy’s mother befriended Yvonne, another patient with dementia; staff called them “Thelma and Louise.” Relatives found escape bags in their closets—Yvonne’s with clothes and photos, Sarah’s with candy and an old bra. Sarah had vascular dementia and was moved into assisted living in 2018 against her will after losing her right to drive. Macy’s youngest child, Sasha, comforted her during the transition. Sarah’s feisty, frugal personality intensified with dementia. For her 90th birthday, the family hired a Frank Sinatra impersonator, and she delighted in the celebration. During a final COVID-restricted window visit, she tells Macy that she misses herself.

Four days after Sarah’s stroke, Macy and Cookie sit by the hospice bed, noticing a decorative pillow quoting Gene that Sarah had annotated in pen. A hospice nurse’s phone buzzes with the news that Biden won the election. Cookie immediately calls it fraudulent. Some of Macy’s old friends have embraced QAnon. A liberal ex-boyfriend now admires Putin. The Urbana Daily Citizen has shrunk to a twice-weekly paper with two staff members. Editor Brenda Burns receives angry calls from readers who consider the AP “fake news.” A January 6 insurrection planner was a Champaign County bartender.

Macy fears political divisions have damaged her family irreparably. A sister-in-law on her husband’s side accusingly says that people like Macy do not want her “people” to exist. Macy feels caught between loving her family and disagreeing with their politics. She recalls an economically diverse neighborhood where poor children lived near wealthy ones. Urbana College was founded in 1850 by Swedenborgians; the Curry Institute aimed to be a northern counterpart to Tuskegee for Black students. A 1917 county historian praised education as a public good.

Family court judge Lori Reisinger says today’s students lack respect for authority. Judge Nick Selvaggio reports that cases of people fleeing the police have quadrupled. Reisinger shares a case of a mother with meth addiction and five children in the system. A recent survey shows that Urbana students’ top career aspiration is social media influencer. Macy’s old block now looks fortified. A former paper route customer, Lillian Huggins, died after falling onto a heating grate and burning to death; she was only discovered when smoke poured from her house. In 1990s letters, Sarah described factory closures turning Urbana into a “ghost town.”

After marrying Gene, Sarah found happiness and domestic hobbies. Macy credits her mixed-income neighborhood and good schools for her escape from poverty, echoing sociologist Raj Chetty’s research. Former childhood prankster Chad Seeberg, now a police captain and source, observes that college graduates without family wealth or farms rarely return. Seeberg cites declining resilience, mental health crises, and parental failures as responsible for the town’s decline.

A new Intel plant nearby struggles to find construction workers. A former factory supervisor now works at a vape shop for half her previous salary. Her daughter, Maddie Allen, a promising student, plans to ride a rusty bicycle 20 miles each way to community college classes.

Chris Flowers recalls learning in second grade that the domestic violence in her home was not normal when a friend reacted with horror to her casual mention of her father beating her mother. Flowers’s college path contrasted with Macy’s; she graduated with significant debt. After freshman year at Muskingum College, she almost dropped out, but a counselor helped secure loans and scholarships. The experience inspired her to become an educator who prioritizes humanity.

Ronald Reagan stigmatized need-based aid as welfare; his education secretary, William J. Bennett, dismissed education as a poverty-fighting tool. Civil rights scholar Taylor Branch explains how racism was redirected into anti-government sentiment. Political scientist Steven Levitsky links white-identity politics to demographic shifts and economic decline in rural areas. By the 1990s, poor students were steered toward community colleges and loans. Sociologist Sara Goldrick-Rab calls aid defunding pulling the ladder up behind the next generation.

In 1998, Macy taught remedial English at a community college and encouraged gifted single mother Meribeth Ingram to pursue a four-year degree. Ingram transferred successfully and built a professional career but graduated with $57,000 in debt. At teacher training, Macy challenged a speaker who denigrated Pell recipients. Her husband urged her to write about it, leading to the essay “The Scarlet P.” She later spoke at a DC event honoring Senator Pell and met him; a priest in the audience wept throughout her speech.

Higher education scholar Don Heller explains that university presidents prioritize prestige over access for poor students and tells Macy that community college alone would not have lifted her from poverty. Macy recalls that her mother understood that college meant leaving home for good. Flowers discusses “class migrant” challenges, including survivor’s guilt and anxiety. Flowers’s current job involves teaching students how to function professionally. A local recruiter says only one in 10 new hires lasts six months, underscoring the problem. The last major locally owned factory, Johnson Welded Products, is sold days after Macy interviews the owner, who describes the difficulty of securing reliable labor.

Flowers bonded with Silas through her daughter and the band. Silas has an ACE (adverse childhood experience) score of 10, the maximum. A network including Flowers, Perry, and Sapp supported him; Sapp’s office was a safe haven. He coached Silas for a court appearance, urging him to use his band status to ask for leniency for driving without a license. Silas came out as trans to Sapp first. Urbana High was his seventh school.

Silas’s long-term goal is to raise his younger siblings in foster care. His scholarships cover tuition and books but not living costs. Living in Marysville with his mother on Suboxone and probation, he sets boundaries while worrying about her having a relapse. After graduating, stress—including his grandparents’ visit—triggers deep depression that culminates in a suicide attempt. His mother finds him unconscious and revives him. He persuades her not to hospitalize him by agreeing to therapy. After sleeping for 24 hours, he returns to work at McDonald’s despite lingering grogginess.