I could not put this book down.

What we’ve got here is a working class girl, who employed a Pell grant to go to college, who became a successful writer, who goes back to her hometown of Urbana, Ohio to see what’s going on, to see how it’s changed, to see how all those people became TRUMPERS!

That’s right, I don’t think a lot of MAGA people are going to read this, but it’s not really a polemic against them, rather a delineation of where they’re coming from.

“Paper Girl” is akin to Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.” So if you read that one, this is right up your alley. However, as I got about halfway through, I realized “Paper Girl” was less about narrative than an exposition of themes. But still, I just could not stop reading it. I yearn for a book that calls out to me, that keeps me from surfing the web endlessly, that I want to dive into, “Paper Girl” is one of those books.

You don’t know what goes on behind closed doors. Author Beth Macy’s father dropped out of school in the seventh grade, went to war and met her mother while he was working at a gas station. Furthermore, he was an alcoholic. Her mother was the breadwinner, but it was not that much bread. Not that Beth was unhappy, she didn’t really know any other life, and she had friends and was involved in school activities and…

Then the whole world changed. You know this.

First opioids invaded this area. The parents here are constantly going to jail or losing their kids because they’re drug-addicted. That didn’t happen when I was growing up. And some families are living in motels. As for going to school, that’s not a priority.

And Macy makes a big point about school. Most of those on the left don’t realize that the right is doing its best to eviscerate public schools, which they call “government schools.” You hear about vouchers and…the bottom line is they’re starving traditional institutions. And even if you make it through… A Pell grant today does not cover one’s entire education, just a fraction of it, unlike in Macy’s era. Because our nation is about cutting costs and making sure everybody carries their own burdens. Macy also brings up how those at the top don’t want to give those at the bottom advantages, they want those for their own kids, and that is true.

So one of Beth’s sisters got pregnant as a teenager and spent most of her life married to a religious zealot, who molested her daughter, but the mother wouldn’t believe it.

Nobody’s going anywhere fast. And even those who want to give back… The state authorizes a $2+ million grant to a youth center, but the Republican mayor and his minions put the kibosh on that, primarily because the man who runs it is on the other side of the political spectrum, and ran against the mayor in the last election. Sometimes it’s just that simple.

As for the truant officer… She deals with a family that believes they’re sovereign citizens, that the rules don’t apply to them.

The bottom line is if you miss a certain amount of school there’s big trouble, so all these parents say they’re home-schooling their kids, and Ohio got rid of any hoops home-schoolers have to jump through.

And if you’re gay, forget about it.

Then there’s the left wing college boyfriend who flips and becomes a Trumper.

And there’s the relative who won’t get a transplant because he doesn’t want to risk getting the organ of someone who got the Covid vaccine.

You may laugh at all this, but you are living in a bubble. Too many of those on the left are. They don’t realize these people were left behind. That retraining after NAFTA…that didn’t happen.

And one of the eye-openers is that just getting people to show up for work is nearly impossible. One company just lets you show up when you want to, otherwise they wouldn’t have enough employees.

And like the newspaper reporter she started out as, Macy keeps hammering the lack of local news. How no one knows what is going on in their hometown, but they’re up to speed about national issues, even if misinformed. The lack of local news is a distinct problem, but propping up newspapers is not the solution, this is what the digital disruption of the past few decades has taught us. You don’t want to save the struggling old, you want to find a new way. But so far, no one has cracked the nut.

Education and news, those are Macy’s main foci.

But “Paper Girl” is neither off the cuff nor a bummer. It is incredibly well-researched, half the book is footnotes. There are a lot of experts out there, some who predicted where we were going, but were unfortunately ignored.

And there are some laughs, and not everybody and everything is downtrodden in Urbana, but…

Three out of four people in the county within which Urbana sits voted for Trump.

And:

“…he won 91 percent of the counties lacking a professional source of local news, trouncing Harris by an average of 54 points.”

And:

“Rigid thinking is a trauma response.”

And a lot of these people have experienced trauma. And Macy says how the poor live their lives based on relationships, with a very short term outlook. One girl gives the money she needed for rent to her mother for her expenses…just like people had given money to the girl when she was down and out. It’s an entire subculture.

And:

“‘And scared people will trade a lot for a sense of stability.'”

And:

“Traumatized people often cling to what little security they have. The monster they know.”

And the piece-de-resistance:

“‘Emerging neurological research has shown clear links between despair and vulnerability to misinformation, right-wing radicalization, and violence,’ noted a Brookings Institutions study Chad shared with me.”

“Paper Girl” is not one-sided. You don’t get the feeling Macy had an agenda and then went out to find stories to prove it. She just interviewed people. At length and over years. People reveal their true colors. Some of her close friends growing up no longer shared the same political outlook. And then there were those who kept giving back, opening their own pockets for those in need. And, one of the things that keeps kids in school, that creates cohesion for students, is the band… But:

“Because of school fees, the cost of instruments, and the need for transportation home from after-school practices, the band is now so small that it can no longer spell out the word ‘Hillclimbers,’ the school’s team name, as we did when I marched in it. It’s no longer big enough, even, to spell ‘Urbana.'”

The doctor, who grew up on a farm in the area and came back says:

“Sometimes I feel like I’m the one person in their week who sits and listens to them. The loneliness, it’s huge.'”

As for the left wing take on the right:

“At a gathering in the college town of Lexington, Virginia, for a mutual friend’s book release, the celebrated photographer Sally Mann told me that Democrats had never done anything worthy of provoking the ire of the right. I told her about my trips home, including the ammo-buying activists. I suggested that maybe she was too insulated to understand the rage provoked by globalization, Christian nationalism, and widespread rural despair—and how truly nihilistic the American experiment seemed to be turning. We argued for a bit, and she pushed back hard, as if she didn’t believe me. Finally,  I threw up my arms and sputtered out the rawest description I could manage on the spot: HURT DOGS BITE.”

And in summation:

“The changes wrought on Urbana were a microcosm of the country’s larger failures to address the collapsing economic order brought on by global trade, the transfer of control from public to private, and the growing impotence of what was once a free, fair and fact-checked local press.”

“Paper Girl” is not an obscure book, even Obama said it was one of his favorites of the year…then again, that might make some not want to read it.

Macy is not an amateur. You might know her from her earlier book “Dopesick,” about the opioid crisis, which was made into a well-reviewed Hulu series starring Michael Keaton.

But getting someone to read a book, especially if they don’t agree with everything in it, is a heavy lift.

But like I said, I couldn’t stop reading “Paper Girl.” Because this is America, and you should know what is truly happening here. Not enough people do.