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 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. In nearby Springfield, Macy watched as her ex-boyfriend—once the most liberal person she knew—became a lead voice of opposition against the Haitian immigrants, parroting false talking points throughout the 2024 presidential campaign.
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.
Beth Macy has won more than two dozen national journalism awards, including a Nieman Fellowship for Journalism at Harvard University, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Dopesick, which was made into a Peabody Award-winning series for Hulu. Three of her books have been New York Times bestsellers.
Copies of Paper Girl are available for pre-order, and other titles by Beth Macy are available for purchase, at White Whale Bookstore.
WHEN
Monday, December 8, 2025 at 7:30 p.m. ET
SUBSCRIBE NOW: In-Person
WHERE
Carnegie Music Hall (Oakland)
4400 Forbes Ave, Pittsburgh, PA 15213
WATCH AT HOME
Your Online Access Pass includes a livestream of the lecture, as well as on-demand access during a viewing period of one week. The link to view the livestream will be sent to your email on the day of the program.
SUBSCRIBE NOW: Online Access
