Paper Girl is another book that appeared on President Obama’s reading list. I have avoided many “timely” books recently, as my reactions to what is currently happening in this country are difficult to process. With the recommendation from the former President, though, I have embarked on a number of books that attempt to explain why we are where we are.

Beth Macy grew up in Urbana, Ohio. Her family was poor, and her father was an alcoholic. Beth was the youngest of four children, and something of a surprise. Her siblings were quite a bit older than she was. Even though they weren’t well off, Urbana gave Beth a sense of community. People cared about each other and looked out for each other when she was growing up there back in the 1970s and 1980s. When she would travel home to visit her family, she could see the town changing, and she didn’t like what she saw.

Paper Girl is her attempt to figure out how her hometown changed so much. It was once a celebrated historical stop on the Underground Railroad. People went to great lengths to help escaped slaves dodge slavecatchers and travel to Canada. Her trips home seemed to show people becoming more and more narrow-minded rather than welcoming. It happened within her own family.

Beth Macy recounts the conversations she has with the people she knew in Urbana. Some of them are long-time friends who once seemed to be more liberal and open to ideas, yet ended up embracing conspiracy theories and siding with white nationalists. It’s hard for her to reconcile this. In an effort to understand the people whom she called friends who now espouse this, she attempts to have constructive conversations with them while researching this book. The result is that, more often than not, she is the one making concessions to them.

One of the topics she harps on is how she was able to break away from the poverty endemic in the area. She wasn’t the best student out there, and her life very easily could have gone another way, but the Pell Grant and other scholarships she received enabled her to find life outside of the town. Macy interacts with younger people like her, who are caught in the trap of poverty and don’t have the same helping hands available that she had. In particular, a young man named Silas shows promise again and again, but keeps failing at being able to break away.

This comparison of what she was able to do and how young people don’t have the same opportunities she had is a huge part of the problem right now, and one our generation doesn’t seem to grasp. Beth’s conversations with those who are the most adamant that they know what the problem is with the younger generation prove that they don’t understand that it’s not the same playing field that they were dealing with.

Macy isn’t just critical of the right-wing. She lands hard on Democrats for pushing through NAFTA, which did exactly what Ross Perot had warned us it would. There was a “giant sucking sound” across the Midwest of jobs going away and factories closing. Left-leaning politicians flippantly said people should train for another job or move to where the jobs are. It’s not always desirable, nor as easy as it sounds.

While I liked Paper Girl, I don’t see it as presenting any real solutions. Macy seems to be advocating for more honest conversations between people without judgment, but it’s not a simple process. Within her own family, her one sister married a man who abused her daughter, yet she was in denial about it. It came down to Beth and their mother to help that child after her mother chose her husband over her daughter. Beth tries to facilitate a reconciliation between them long after the husband has died, but it won’t happen. And why should it? Her niece is honest that she looks at her stepfather and the choices her mother made as having ruined her life, despite the fact that she’s in a good place now. Is she supposed to put her own feelings aside? Macy herself has two non-CIS children, and when one was getting married, she had to have an honest conversation with her sister about whether she could come to the wedding. Having been treated differently by relatives because I was adopted, I would never want to put a child of mine through that pain, never mind one where relatives make it even worse by calling you an abomination.

Macy narrates the audiobook, and I thought she did a great job. Her voice is clear, and she reads the book with emphasis in the right places. At just shy of 9 hours, it’s not a very long read, and I burned through it in about 3 days. It was very engaging without being dramatic.

A few years back, a good friend was becoming more and more right-wing despite being active in her Union at work. Another friend of ours neutrally spent time with her and came back to me to say that she was coming from a place of a lot of fear. Beth Macy says the same thing in Paper Girl. I think her conclusion of how we got here is spot on. I just don’t know that she has any solutions other than bending over backwards to accommodate those who are racist, homophobic, and xenophobic. Is that who we really want to be?