Thomas Wolfe was wrong. Turns out you can go home again. At least that’s what I learned Sunday, when about 250 Urbanans turned out to fill a movie theater to hear me talk about my new book, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America, which publishes today!
My second-grade teacher was there, and she seemed to have reverse-aged.
My relatives and first friends from kindergarten came, too, as did a handful of civic leaders—but by no means all.
As far as I could tell—now granted, they hadn’t read it yet—people were receptive to some of the harshest story lines in the book, including:
The brother who unfriended me on Facebook “because of all the liberal shit you post”—and how we came back together after that.
The sister who shouted that the election of 2020 was fraudulent next to our mother’s death bed—and how we came to our tacit agree-to-disagree.
Most seemed to listen openly about the sad data showing that school attendance and graduation rates have plummeted alongside local news coverage, leaving so many rural Americans behind to live in so-called news deserts where we don’t know what we don’t know. (There’s an excerpt today in LitHub about that.)
An excerpt in my favorite magazine, The Atlantic, also dropped today describing the shifts that have occurred in Urbana since I left 40 years ago – a microcosm of small cities in rural America — and I spoke at length with Aisla Chang on All Things Considered and to Dave Davies on Fresh Air.
Washington Post reviewer Leigh Haber called it the best-timed book for this moment and wrote of it: “Macy follows closely in the footsteps of such heroic journalists as Barbara Ehrenreich and Tracy Kidder, combining memoir with reportage, a raft of sobering statistics and, most uniquely in our era, a willingness to engage in uncomfortable conversations.”
I’m grateful to everyone who helped with the book in Urbana and elsewhere, and the team at Penguin Press, especially publicist Gail Brussel (but I worry, does she ever sleep?).
If you haven’t ordered a copy yet, I hope you’ll do so from your favorite retailer.
Tickets are nearly sold out for my adopted hometown event at Charter Hall in the Roanoke City Market building on Oct. 16; a reception starts at 6, and the $40 price includes a book, beautiful food and drinks, and a donation to a Virginia Western Community College program that helps first-generation and foster-care kids like Silas, who was featured in my New York Times story last week.
All other events are listed on my website here. I can’t wait to see you out on the tour. If I’m not coming to your city, I’ll be posting from the road, Lord willin’ and the planes still rise (appreciate those TSA workers still showing up despite the shutdown).
I’m eager and anxious to see the response to my examination of why the nation became so polarized and how we move forward. As my friend-since-kindergarten says in the most trenchant line of book, “How do we love beyond what we can’t agree with or even understand?”
If you’re so inclined, I hope you’ll share the book with your networks, both online and off. Posting about Paper Girl on social media, reviewing it on Amazon and Goodreads, and suggesting it for your book club (discussion guide here) go a long way towards helping the book launch successfully!
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