"Urbana, Ohio, is a small city of 11,000, where nearly three out of four voters went for Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election. The journalist Beth Macy, who in her previous books chronicled the widening fissures in American society by examining the opioid crisis and the aftereffects of globalization, grew up there. In Paper Girl, she returns to Urbana-a place beset by economic decline, dwindling public resources, failing schools, and the disappearance of local journalism."
"She wants to understand what happened. Her focus is less on the reason for the decline than on the question of why people-even close family members-stopped talking with one another. How is it that Americans with disagreements are unable even to find the language to converse? With that in mind, Macy seeks to do something seemingly simple but actually profound: talk with people she knows, even if they seem to live in a different reality, and try to find a common humanity."
"She visits with family and old friends, some of whom share her view of the world and, more important, others who see things very differently. At one point, Macy is interviewing her sister Cookie, who believes the 2020 election was rigged, when Macy's older child, who is gay, comes up. Cookie quotes a line from scripture: A man "shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination." Macy tells her she's not invited to her son's wedding."
Urbana, Ohio is a small city of 11,000 with overwhelming 2020 support for Donald Trump and clear signs of economic decline: dwindling public resources, failing schools, and vanished local journalism. The narrative centers on the breakdown of interpersonal communication as political and cultural divisions harden, leading family members and longtime friends to stop speaking. Personal interviews reveal election denial, scripture-cited homophobia, death threats disrupting reunions, and persistent efforts by some community members to bridge differences and recover shared humanity.
Read at The Atlantic
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