Beth Macy, before she was congressional candidate Beth Macy, still just journalist and bestselling author Beth Macy, was thinking through the idea for her next book, which she envisioned as being a memoir about growing up in rural Ohio, and how it had turned MAGA red since she left.
A smart editor said, Wait a minute, I’ve got an idea.
Embed yourself in your hometown, the editor said, like you did when you were writing about the ravages of NAFTA in Factory Man, when you were writing about the opioid crisis in Dopesick.
That’s the better book.
The memoir, of course, would have been the easier route.
Because she wouldn’t have spent 10 hours interviewing the ex-boyfriend who converted her into liberalism in college, and now spends hours a day reading Russian propaganda, and who would become one of the point people on the “they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats” lie about Springfield, Ohio, a half-hour away from Urbana, her hometown.
Or initiated the hard conversations with her sister, who had made a scene, as their mother lay dying, about the 2020 election being fraudulent.
Or had to confront the brother who unfriended her on Facebook because of, quote, “all the liberal sh-t” she posts online.
“It was just so much more surprising, so much more painful than I thought it would be,” said Macy, whose memoir, Paper Girl, was released last year, ahead of her announcing her candidacy for the Democratic Party nomination for Congress in the Sixth District, which stretches from Roanoke into the Valley.
There was more pain – reconnecting with high school friends who would bash her job as a news reporter and author; seeing the hometown paper that she delivered as a pre-teen reduced to having one full-time staffer, who can only do so much.
News deserts, we both agree, are among the key reasons our country is where it is right now.
In a lot of ways, Beth Macy’s story is my own – except that, she’s the bestselling author who had a book turned into a seminal Hulu TV series among the two of us.
But I’ve also come to know, several steps down the media ladder, the frustrations that Macy spelled out in Paper Girl, and discussed with me this week in an interview for my “Street Knowledge” podcast.
We both have family and friends who have been manipulated by the right-wing media and MAGA politicians into voting against their interests – access to affordable healthcare, affordable housing, jobs that pay a living wage.
At the risk of losing 98 percent of the audience here, we’re both the poor soul in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, who know that the images on the wall are illusions that we’re manipulated by elites into thinking are reality, but can’t figure out how to get that point across.
Alright, I lost 99.98 percent of you there, but let Google be your friend
I’ve been efforting at this my entire adult life, and I’m at a loss.
“I wish I had more answers,” Macy said, when I asked her for advice, which doesn’t help me out at all, thanks, anyway.
Actually, though, she does have some good ideas on how we can try to bridge the gap between liberals and MAGAs.
“The main thing I learned was we have to practice grace with people who haven’t had the same experiences we’ve had,” Macy said, and honestly, that would be a good suggestion for people on either side of the divide.
Now, yes, it can be almost impossibly hard to practice grace as Macy has had to do, with family and friends quoting Leviticus at her to tell her that her gay son and nonbinary child are an “abomination,” which, I mean, them’s fighting words, right?
“But when my brother says, Tell me about Sasha, does he date girls, I remember a training I got in Chicago from a rapper named Rhymefest, who’s now on the Chicago School Board, who spends every summer in Cody, Wyoming, with a group of rural people that he says he has to practice grace with 20 times a day, because they haven’t had the same experience, who won’t go to Chicago because they think if they set foot in Chicago, they’ll be blown up by gangsters, right, so he takes a pause.
“I thought of that when my brother asked me, Does he still date girls? I took a pause, and I said, yes, they’re, in fact, they’re dating a young woman now, and yes, you’re gonna love her, her name’s Mina,” Macy said.
Her brother, incidentally, is, Macy tells me, a “super fan” of Sasha’s band, Palmyra, “and drives eight hours and sits on a bad hip in the back of a album release party in Charlottesville, tapping his toes.”
“Barbara Kingsolver says, Love stays alive if you tend it like a flame, and that’s what I try to do,” Macy said.
The hard part to this for me with all of this is, people telling me I’m “elitist” – when, dammit to hell, I grew up in a trailer park, my mom supporting two kids on a $3.35-an-hour job, learning to appreciate a good ketchup sandwich, which is what the name would suggest it is.
“My mom made $8,000 a year test driving cars for a Honda subcontractor, working second shift. She called it second trip,” Macy said. “We ate government cheese. She figured out how to make grilled cheese with a smear of mayo and white bread and minced onion. It’s the best grilled cheese. I still make my grilled cheese that way, even though I don’t use government cheese.”
I still eat ketchup sandwiches, now with a smear of mustard; you can take the kid out of the trailer park, but you can’t take the trailer park out of the kid.
“James Baldwin said, If you change the way people think about the world even by a millimeter, you’ve changed the world, and I really take that to heart,” Macy said. “I really take to heart, when I was a newspaper reporter, and in my books, that my job is to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable. I write about outsiders and underdogs, because I was one, and I was about 10 years into my career before I realized that those were the stories that most align with my values, and then I did the best job with them.”
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Chris Graham
