DAVE DAVIES, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies. Our guest today, Beth Macy, is an award-winning reporter, author and chronicler of working-class America, much of her work focusing on the Appalachian region. Her first book was about a Virginia furniture factory owner determined to resist Chinese competition. She followed with two books on the opioid crisis and grassroots efforts to fight it. Her latest book continues her focus on working people in rural America, but this time through the lens of a personal memoir.
Macy grew up in the town of Urbana, Ohio, where she says she was one of the poorest kids in her class and felt it. She writes that her childhood had its share of chaos, addiction and utility cutoff notices, but that she managed to escape poverty and forge a career in journalism because she got to college and completed a four-year degree. Her book is a deeply reported look at the Urbana she left, where the factory jobs have largely disappeared, creating economic pressures that lead to family dysfunction, while social supports and educational opportunities have eroded. She found it hard to communicate with family members and old friends who've embraced conspiratorial thinking. The more time she spent in her hometown, Macy writes, the more she recognized forces that were turning the community she loved into a poorer, sicker, angrier and less educated place.
Beth Macy spent many years reporting for The Roanoke, Virginia Times and has written four previous books, three of which were New York Times bestsellers. Her book "Dopesick" was made into a Peabody- and Emmy Award-winning Hulu series on which Macy served as an executive producer and co-writer. Macy's new book is "Paper Girl: A Memoir Of Home And Family In A Fractured America."
Well, Beth Macy, welcome back to FRESH AIR.
BETH MACY: Thanks for having me, Dave.
DAVIES: You know, most of your books have been these deeply reported studies on the impacts of many things on working people - deindustrialization, the opioid epidemic. This book is also deeply reported. It's not just your memories, but it's a look at your family and the community you grew up in and left and how they've changed. What decided to make you take on this project, which is more personal?
MACY: It was really a moment that I had with my sister, who is 13 years older, at our mother's deathbed. And it happened to be the Saturday after the election of 2020, the day they were counting the votes, and my mom was in hospice. She was 93. She wasn't expected to live, you know, but a day or two longer. And the hospice nurse's phone pinged, and she goes, they're calling it for Biden. And my sister, who had never been political before but who was very evangelical, sort of shouted, wait. It's fraudulent. He won't win. And I just was astonished. I didn't realize how much we operated in different information ecosystems, but there were some clues.
As I was driving home more often to see my mom, I noticed things, like, in Urbana, which was once - we were very proud about it being an important stop on the Underground Railroad. I would now see Confederate flags flying, and I noticed that a lot of my friends were posting really political things on Facebook. And even my own brother, who I was very close to, unfriended me at one point during the - Trump's first administration because of, quote, "all the liberal crap" I post. Now, I post - I'm a journalist. I post fact-checked articles, mainly from The Washington Post and The New York Times, some of which are articles that I've written myself. And I was really stymied by that. And so I decided after Mom's death to figure out what, if anything, was left of my family, my hometown and my country.
DAVIES: All right. And it took you a couple - three years to do this, right? The research?
MACY: Yeah, about two years of going - I would go home about for a week, a month, and, like, scores of interviews.
DAVIES: OK. So let's talk about this. You grew up in Urbana, Ohio. It's a rural town, although most people weren't involved in agriculture. Your mom, it seemed, was the rock of your family. Tell us about her.
MACY: Absolutely. So my mom was feisty, funny, gritty. I was the midlife accident, the youngest by far of four. And by the time I came along, my dad was a not-very-functioning alcoholic, and so it was really on Mom to do everything, to work. She would work at Grimes Manufacturing, which was the nation's premier maker of airplane lights and navigational lights. And she would work those jobs until the economy would tank periodically, and she'd get laid off. And then she would have to pick up under-the-table work like babysitting and waitressing - really badly, she said - and all the things that the folks that I later interviewed for books like "Factory Man" were doing.
And so, I mean, that was one reason I was drawn to tell the story of what left - what was left behind by globalization, because I had grown up with that same kind of financial precarity. And as I started going back to Urbana for the book, I realized through interviews that the middle class, which had been very hardy, the schools, which had been very good when I was growing up, weren't so strong anymore. And so I - as I began to peel the layers of the onion, I started to realize that people weren't showing up for work. People weren't sending their kids to school. The school folks were saying, you know, it's really, really hard to educate a large portion of the students because first we have to teach them what one person said was how to human.
DAVIES: Going back for a second, you said your dad was an alcoholic who did not do so well as his later years went on. And he was abusive to you at least once, right?
MACY: Oh, verbally abusive many times, physically abusive a couple of times. It wasn't a great environment to grow up in, with the exception of my mom and my Grandma Macy next door, who literally owned our house and kept a roof over our heads. But, you know, when I talked earlier about the hollowing out of the middle class now, what was different back then is I had these friends whose parents were wonderful to me, who would give me rides home from sports practices and band practices and who would buck me up when I was feeling low. And also, because I had this incredible grandma next door who taught me how to read and write before I went to kindergarten, I had the confidence when I got to public schools and met these fantastic teachers to know that I might be poorer than the rest of the kids, but they weren't necessarily smarter than me. And I think that really helped me.
DAVIES: There was a family that made you lunch almost every day for a year, or something like this?
MACY: Helen Wellman (ph). It would be egg salad, tuna salad, chicken salad. Then we'd go back to egg. And her daughter, Tanya (ph), would take me home for lunch every day, and every little heartbreak I ever had, Helen was my counselor.
DAVIES: So it really was a community. The book is called "Paper Girl," which has a double meaning. I mean, you delivered papers as a kid to your neighbors, and you then spent many, many years writing for a daily newspaper. When did you start that? Tell us about that, delivering papers.
MACY: Yeah. I started helping the Kellenberger (ph) boys, who lived catty-corner from me. They were a couple years older than me, and I was like, this is a pretty good gig. And they'd share their pay with me, and I loved getting a little bit of pocket money. And then I always wanted to buy my own clothes because I hated the things. Like, my mom probably couldn't afford nice clothes. So I - so then I got my own paper route. So I could buy my own clothes, and I could save up for the field trip to Washington, D.C., which would be my first time crossing state lines. It was almost like I thought the atmosphere would change as the Greyhound crossed the state line.
And, you know, I just worked for things, and I loved working. And the great thing about growing up in Urbana then, when it had a solid middle class, was I would deliver in my neighborhood to all kinds of people - lower middle class, middle class, upper middle class. It was possible to grow up right around the corner from a wealthy person and to get to take advantage of public things that all kids got to take advantage of then.
DAVIES: We need to take a break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Beth Macy. Her new book is "Paper Girl: A Memoir Of Home And Family In A Fractured America." We'll continue our conversation in just a moment. This is FRESH AIR.
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DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we're speaking with veteran reporter and author Beth Macy. She has a new book about her trips back to see the town in Ohio she grew up in. It's called "Paper Girl: A Memoir Of Home And Family In A Fractured America."
You managed to go to college, to Bowling Green State University, and this was clearly a huge thing in your life. You write that had you been born a decade later, you probably wouldn't have been able to go. Why?
MACY: Because when I left for college in 1982, I remember filling out the financial aid paperwork. My mom helped me. Our family income was $8,000 a year, and - which put us in the lowest quartile. And the Pell Grant is need-based, so we qualified for the full freight. So that means I got my state tuition paid for, my room and board. My textbooks were paid for. And I always had two or three work-study jobs so I could have pizza and beer money, just like everybody else, and not feel like a food stamp recipient in the line at Whole Foods, you know? And it changed my life.
It just totally changed my life, going to college. Not that I made great money as a newspaper reporter. For many, many years, it was paycheck to paycheck. But what it did is it took me out of the environment I was raised in and it put me in a peer group of people, including my husband, who were solidly middle class and not having to deal with addiction, trauma, utility cut-off notices. And it was just a peaceful environment that I hadn't before experienced.
DAVIES: You describe your mom driving you to college that freshman year. And she knew that this was going to change things, that you weren't going to be coming back, didn't she?
MACY: I think she did. I've got this funny picture of her sort of half waving, half smiling, pretending to cry, saying goodbye to me. And I remember saying - on the way up, I was so nervous. She could probably hear my stomach, you know, making weird noises. And, you know, about half asked her to turn around and take me back 'cause no one in my family had been to college. And I remember her saying she had read in - she was a great reader - I read in a magazine somewhere that your high school friends - it's great to hang out with your high school friends, but your college roommate will be your best friend for life. And, you know, she was trying to find, like, optimistic things to say, which was really cute 'cause she probably really didn't want me to go. We were pretty close.
And - you know, and then when I moved out of state for my first reporting job, which was in Savannah, Georgia, that was out of state at a daily newspaper, she looked at me and I knew she was going to deadpan something. She goes, I've thought about it. You can't go. And she - at that point, I'm pretty sure she was certain that I would never come home again. But, you know, we always visited. And, you know, we didn't always get along 100% of the time. We had that three-day rule about house guests and fish. That's about how long we could stand each other. But we loved each other deeply.
DAVIES: One of the funniest moments in the book is a typewritten poem that she gave you after, I think, you'd had this argument about, I guess - she would complain about how short your visits were while you were visiting, which was maybe not the best time to bring that up. Should we share that?
MACY: Sure. Yeah. It's called "An Easter Greeting To My Mean Daughter." So what had happened was it must have been, like, early spring of, call it, 1984. And I was kind of having a hard time. I don't know if it was a boyfriend or whatever. And I had called home to talk to her. And she's a recently widowed person still, you know, struggling to pay her bills, and she just wasn't very sympathetic. So I don't have the letter I wrote, thank God, 'cause I wouldn't want to read it. But apparently, I wrote quite an over-the-top, mean letter saying that, you should be supportive.
So that Friday, I drove home in my really, really used VW Bug, and I arrived home. She worked second shift at the moment. And there - she very kindly left me a Crock-Pot full of chili. She made the best chili. And there was an Easter egg for me that she had bought from somebody at work - it was a chocolate peanut butter Easter egg - and this poem called "An Easter Greeting To My Mean Daughter."
(Reading) Your nasty letter really hurt, but over it I've got. I know you didn't mean it. You know I care a lot. And so at Easter time, let's try to nicen up a lot. Remember, I'm your super mom and the only one you've got. And you are my special super kid, like which there is no other. So happy Easter, Beth, from your bitchy, bitchy mother.
DAVIES: (Laughter) You mentioned that you got to go to school to get a four-year degree because you had a - you qualified for a Pell Grant. What became of the Pell Grants?
MACY: Well, the Pell Grants are still in existence, but what happened is college tuitions just began skyrocketing. The federal government started cutting education in the '80s under Reagan, who had a secretary of education named William Bennett who called the very notion of education as a portal to upward mobility - he called it sociological flimflammery. And as tuitions started going up and state budgets were having shortfalls in the '90s, state legislatures were also defunding higher ed.
And the Pell Grants, they rose a little but never commensurate with inflation. And the purchasing power of it just dwindled. So now if you're a kid like I was, proportionally poor as I was then, a Pell Grant would only pay about 30% of state university cost. And I wouldn't have been able to go. Even 10 years later I wouldn't have been able to go. And my point in saying this is not only did it save my life, but I have paid that money back so many times through making more money and higher tax, you know, paying more in taxes. And we know that the typical Pell student pays that money back within 10 years' time. So it's so shortsighted to have basically taken this option away from poor folks.
DAVIES: You know, I want to just note for readers that there's so much in this book. You talk to a lot of people, I mean, academics and policy experts, to be sure, but friends, family, businesspeople, community leaders, a lot of them, including one person who was the county school attendance officer, I guess what we used to call the truant officer. You rode along with her. Brooke Perry was her name. And through her, you could see some of the dysfunction in the lives of a lot of families and the kids that live there. You want to just share some of what you observed there?
MACY: Sure. I mean, first of all, the numbers of kids that weren't showing up to school. This, of course, got really bad during COVID. So we were still seeing some post-COVID stuff. But, I mean, the amount of miles she had put on her car. Like, 100,000 miles in four years on her car, and just driving from one end of the county to the other and picking kids up, getting them out of bed, you know, giving them alarm clocks, rescuing children who had been sexually abused and taking them to social services. The things she saw curled my toes. I would try to do a ride along with her almost every trip if she was available. But one day she said, oh, we're going to go to doozy.
And so she takes me to this gorgeous farmhouse surrounded by soybean fields way out in the country. And she says, this is the family. We have been trying to charge them with truancy charges for years now. They won't even fill out the paperwork to homeschool. They just tell us they're homeschooling. And, you know, dogs had attacked her. We get there. She has to leave a notice saying she's been there. But we have to call the cops to come out because there's a big sign right outside their gate that says - it's a bull's-eye, and it says, if you can read this, you're in shooting range.
So they were basically what was called, a term I didn't know at the time, sovereign citizens. They don't believe in government. You know, they ride on our roads, but they don't believe in paying taxes or sending their kids to school. And another time I was out with her taking a young girl who was being raised by her grandparents, which is also not uncommon, largely thanks to the opioid crisis and fentanyl and methamphetamine. We were taking her to school. And then it turns out, a couple of weeks later, the girl turned on Brooke and beat her up. And, you know, this woman...
DAVIES: You were there?
MACY: I wasn't there for that, but I talked to her right after, and I followed up. And just, like, she was working so hard to help these kids. Like, if they would have a good week of attendance, she would figure out what it was they really wanted. One wanted to go to Comic-Con conference in Columbus, so Brooke takes the girl as a reward for going to school, on her own dime. And we know, because I've done the research, that it is these relationships that really make the difference. It's not standardized testing. It's relationships with teachers, with counselors, with folks like Silas' band director and people like Brooke and people like Christine (ph), who was a counselor who said, you know, I have to teach them how to human. And when she does that, it works.
DAVIES: What did she mean by that, teach them how to human?
MACY: Well, I didn't know what she meant either. She was my very first call. Somebody said, you ought to call her because her job is to help kids figure out whether they're going to go into the military, they're going to go into the workforce or they're going to go to college. And when I said, what's the biggest challenge? She said, you know, right at the start of the conversation, she says, well, honestly, it's I have to teach them how to human. And I said, what do you mean? She said, they show up to class, they don't have a pencil. You or I would've asked a friend for a pencil, to borrow a pencil. Instead, they kind of shrug and say to the teacher, I don't have a pencil. You know, rather than, like, asking nicely. So it's just basic things.
And I found the same thing when I was hanging out at the Urbana Youth Center, where they're trying to teach them not only study skills but also some work skills. Like, people, teenagers who've never picked up a broom before. You got to teach them how to sweep with a broom and things of that nature. And, you know, to take your medicine when you're supposed to take your medicine. And again, the successes that I see are when it's the relationship is truly invested in in, like, heart-to-heart way. That's when folks can tend to start to get better.
DAVIES: We need to take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Beth Macy. Her new book is "Paper Girl: A Memoir Of Home And Family In A Fractured America." She'll be back to talk more after this short break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is FRESH AIR.
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DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies. We are listening to my interview with Beth Macy, a veteran journalist who's written several books about the struggles of working-class communities in Appalachia, dealing with the loss of factory jobs to foreign competition and the effects of the opioid epidemic. Her new book is a memoir about her life growing up in a poor family in Urbana, Ohio, and about changes in her hometown in the decades since she left. She described her difficulty talking to friends and family who've embraced conspiratorial views and forces she says are turning the community she loves into a poorer, sicker, angrier and less educated place. Her book is "Paper Girl: A Memoir Of Home And Family In A Fractured America."
You write about your siblings. There are three. You're the youngest of four. All of them, I have to say, are quite interesting people to read about. One of the most troubling stories involves your sister Cookie, who is 13 years older than you. Is that right?
MACY: Mm-hmm.
DAVIES: Yeah. She became a teenage mom, had daughters, had a couple of marriages and then eventually married a third husband recommended by her pastor in a fundamentalist church. And you write that in 1983, Cookie's third husband sexually abused Cookie's daughter Liza, her daughter from a previous marriage. How does she - what does she do - Cookie?
MACY: She goes to her pastor, who has helped her when she was a single mom and who she believes thoroughly, and she asked him what she should do. And she told me not long ago she went in. They knew why she was coming in. They were on the floor praying. And they looked up at her, and they said, we believe her husband is a good man. And that was it. End of story. And she still will tell you, I don't know if that happened. I don't know if that did or didn't happen. And Liza lives with this every day of her life. She told me she thinks about it almost every day. She says, he ruined my life.
DAVIES: So your family still had a relationship with Cookie - I mean, your sister, your mom's daughter - who had disbelieved her own daughter and chosen to believe her husband and pastor about the abuse. What kind of relationship did you and your family have with Cookie after that?
MACY: Well, we had no relationship with her husband. I've not seen him in - since 1985 or '6. I don't even know what he looks like. And - but I've seen Cookie, you know, once a year maybe, while visiting Mom. And we have vastly different beliefs and worldviews, but we love each other. You know, she loves my children. And she's maybe not accepting of who they are as people - they're both queer - but she loves them. And I was surprised recently. I stopped in to visit her 'cause she had bought a condo. And I said, oh, there's my kids on your kitchen bulletin board. She said, of course I put their pictures up. I love them. And we hadn't really spoken much since the interview 'cause it was rough.
DAVIES: Well, that's what I want to talk about. You - for the book, you wanted to interview Cookie about this. And she agreed to talk to you on the record, on tape. Tell us about that conversation.
MACY: Well, we - so we meet at her oldest daughter's house, and I start out with things we can agree on. I read her some letters that our hilarious mom wrote, and we laughed. And I - we looked at old pictures. She brought some photo albums. I mean, I like to do that with people I'm interviewing. It helps people remember things. And then we got into the stuff with Liza, and we had a fairly reasonable conversation about it. She didn't really shy away from it.
And then - it had gone so well. I mean, it had been, like, 2 1/2 hours. And I had to go meet my friend Betty for dinner. And I'm packing up my stuff to go, and I thought, oh, I'm just going to ask her about Max. 'Cause I had announced on - put a thing on Facebook that - with a picture of my son, Max, who was getting ready to marry his fiance, Zack (ph). And, you know - and no one in my family liked it except for my sister Terry. One like - nobody reached out. Nobody congratulated me. And so I - and, you know, Max, after he came out in college, stopped going home to Ohio with me. And he told me later it was because he was worried what Cookie would say to him, and that - then I would have to go off on her, and he didn't want that to happen.
So as I'm packing up, I say, you know, Cookie, Max thinks you don't like him because he's gay. And she says, I love him, but I don't like that he's gay. And then kind of all my Rural Urban Bridge training went out the window, and my face turned red, and I kind of lost composure. And we started arguing about Leviticus and your theology versus my theology. And then finally, I take a deep breath, and I say - I'm thinking of Mr. Rogers, use your words. And I say, Cookie, I'm getting really mad. I guess if we're going to have any relationship at all, we shouldn't talk about this.
And later, a little bit later, she says, well, did he get made fun of when he was in school? And I said, well, if you'll remember, when he was 3 and 4, he'd go to preschool wearing red ruby slippers and a cape he had me sew for him. And she goes, yeah, I remember. She said, well, did he get made fun of when he went to kindergarten? And I said, yeah, he did. And he stopped doing that, and he became angry and anxious because he was having to hide who he was. But I thought, it's a crack. It's a little crack of empathy because she's asking what it felt like to be him and to parent him.
And, you know, I don't know if it makes a difference, but we've got to figure out ways, when we're talking to people who have different views, to start to be vulnerable around them, too. I should have said, you know, I did the best I could with what I knew at the time. What would you have done? So live and learn.
DAVIES: But when you talked to her, I mean, you talked about the abuse of her daughter by her husband, who she was still married to and living with. And then later, when you were putting the book together, you honored a promise you had made to give her a chance to respond to what you'd written. So in a phone call, you read to her some of what you had written about the incident, about the abuse of Liza, her daughter, by her husband. How did she react?
MACY: Well, she didn't say much of anything, and then I could hear her sort of almost hyperventilating or crying in the background. And she said, what should I do? And I said, well, if it were me, I would call up Liza and apologize to her for not believing her for all these years. And she said, I don't know. I don't know. And she - it was like she - it was just sinking in that what Liza had reported maybe had been true. And then the next day, she texted me and she asked me not to put it in. And I said, look, I'm not the perpetrator here. The church and your husband - your husband and the minister that told you to ignore a suffering child are the perpetrators, not me. And, you know, we haven't really talked about it since. We've talked a little, but not a lot, and - which isn't unusual for us.
DAVIES: But, you know, I'm interested in knowing what - in the initial interview for the book and then in this subsequent conversation and text exchange, did she say she didn't believe Liza? She didn't believe that her daughter had been abused?
MACY: She said she wasn't sure. She said that - she kept saying, I was always there. How could it not happen? I mean, I have letters that the girls wrote me. Oh, Mom's at a prayer meeting this week in Nashville or whatever. My mom isn't here. I mean, you're never always there with your kids, right? But in her mind, this is the story that she believed. It was - to me, it was just like she was the - under the thumb of this misogynistic, Christian nationalist men who were telling her what to do and what to think.
DAVIES: And her husband is still alive?
MACY: Yep.
DAVIES: They live together? Yeah.
MACY: Yes.
DAVIES: Yeah. Let's take another break here. We are speaking with Beth Macy. Her new book is "Paper Girl: A Memoir Of Home And Family In A Fractured America." We'll continue our conversation after this short break. This is FRESH AIR.
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DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we're speaking with Beth Macy, a veteran journalist, whose new book is a memoir about her life growing up in a family in Urbana, Ohio, and about changes in her hometown in the decades since she left. It's called, "Paper Girl: A Memoir Of Home And Family In A Fractured America."
Urbana and the surrounding county, Champaign County - right? - are Trump country. You probably knew this. I wonder if - were you surprised when you started doing interviews at the depth and intensity of the support he had there?
MACY: I was. And I was really taken by how many people were believers in QAnon. And the first time I went, I asked my old buddy - we were both class clown. He was the male class clown, I was the female - to drive me around town 'cause he was a recently retired firefighter, and he knew everyone in town. And as we drove around the east in Urbana, he would just point out houses, and he would go, she's QAnon. He's QAnon. And I was like, what? Are you kidding me?
So I invited one of the people that he said, who we both knew, out for coffee. And sure enough, he wasn't wrong. And, you know, I was just, like, listening to her say, Tom Hanks is a pedophile, Michelle Obama is a trans woman, you know, just on and on with this crazy stuff. And she would say, you didn't get the vaccine, did you? Oh, no, you did? And - the COVID vaccine. And I started to think, my family's not so crazy after all.
DAVIES: (Laughter).
MACY: Like, the other person that I reconnected with was a ex-boyfriend named Bill that I hadn't seen in 38 years. And I decided to interview him because a mutual friend had said he had gone from being the most liberal person we knew, to spending four to seven hours a day in - on the internet, looking at Russian propaganda. And that was a fascinating story, so I started meeting with him. I probably spent 10 hours - I probably have 10 hours of recordings with him - and just to see the progression. He went from Bernie to Jill Stein. And I'll tell you where I think he turned was - he was a practicing Catholic and pretty active in his church. And his - a deacon in the church had taken him out after hearing that Bill was going to vote not for Hillary, but for Jill Stein, and said, well, you might as well vote for Trump. And then he thought they were going out for beer, so he felt, like, really ambushed and all of his friends were giving him a hard time. And he just basically sequestered himself online after that.
And as I'm reporting on this book, then the Springfield story breaks out, and lo and behold, Bill, my ex, becomes the lead spokesman for the anti-Haitian contingent in Springfield, Ohio, which is where he lived. It's about 18 miles from Urbana. And that was shocking, too. It was like, there he is on "PBS NewsHour." There he is on BlazeTV. And, you know, I think the last communication I had from him, he was espousing, you know, great replacement theory beliefs and being really, really rude to me, and I decided not to really engage with him anymore.
DAVIES: Now, it's interesting that you also report that you talked to people who were, you know, affluent and educated folks in Urbana - people who were developers and the like. And many of them held these conspiratorial views, too.
MACY: Oh, yeah. They all said - it was like they all got together and decided, we're going to say - we're going to say the election of 2020 was fishy and that the people who perpetrated the January 6 storming of the capital were really antifa. And, you know, a woman I met who worked in the Economic Development Office said she had to quit her church because everybody just assumed that the election was rigged and that everybody thought the same way she did. And in Urbana, three out of four people did vote for Trump. And I don't think everybody who voted for him is that far down the conspiracy rabbit holes, but it was a lot more people than I thought.
DAVIES: And some of them were old friends of yours. Like, I think one of your very first friend was an African American woman named Joy, who is very active in her church now. And you had some real back and forth with her - right? - with you sending her information about mainstream media and fact-checking and all of that. How did...
MACY: Yeah.
DAVIES: How did that go?
MACY: It was surprising, as well. I mean, when she said that she didn't believe George Floyd was murdered by Derek Chauvin - you know, I guess she believed that he had a little fentanyl in his system, and that's what did it, and it wasn't a police murder. You know, at one point, she says that children are identifying as cats and taking litter boxes to school. And I just kind of, like, lean back in my chair and rolled my eyes. And she goes, I know. But how do we still love each other beyond what we can't understand or agree with? And that's where we are. How do we love beyond now in this nation? One in five families are estranged because of politics. There was a piece in The New York Times last week, in "The Daily," where they did a survey showing that 64% of Americans think we're too divided to be able to solve any of our problems and that our divisions actually are a bigger concern now than the economy. I mean, that's where we are now. I had no idea that's where we would be when I started this project.
And I'm still very close to Joy. I mean, she's a lay minister. She conducted my mom's funeral. I love her. She was one of my, she and her parents - her parents were both educators. She gave me a ride to school every day. I wouldn't be who I am without her. But her question, I think about it all the time. How do we love beyond what we can understand?
DAVIES: You spent more time in Urbana, I guess, over the last two or three years when you were reporting for this book than you had in decades. Do you think you'll stay in closer touch with old friends that you had and new ones you made?
MACY: I hope I can. During Trump's first administration, my brother, who was always really supportive of my kids and would come to all their plays and concerts and stuff, unfriended me on Facebook because of, quote, all the "liberal crap" I post. And during this homegoing project, we became close again. And to the point of at one point, Tim leans over to me. He's visiting us here in Virginia, and he's going to go to a Palmyra show. That's my youngest kid's band. My youngest kid is nonbinary, who goes by the name Sasha. And he said, well, tell me about this, does he still date girls?
And because I had done kind of the work on how to respond and have these conversations, I took a breath, and I said, well, they are dating a young woman now, yes. And I sometimes mess up the pronouns, too, which is true. I do still sometimes mess up the pronouns. But he was so kind about it and just curious that I went there with him. And I think we - like, he showed me grace. I showed him grace back. And that's where we need to get back to in this country. He now will drive eight hours to see a Palmyra show, which is just awesome.
DAVIES: Beth Macy, thanks for speaking with us again.
MACY: Thanks for having me again, Dave. You're the best.
DAVIES: Beth Macy's new book is "Paper Girl: A Memoir Of Home And Family In A Fractured America."
Coming up, David Bianculli has an appreciation of TV writer and producer Rod Serling, creator of the series "The Twilight Zone." This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF JAKE MASON TRIO'S "THE STRANGER IN THE MIRROR") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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