Paper Girl

Journalist Beth Macy combines memoir and reporting as she returns to Urbana, Ohio, where she grew up poor, to learn how she became politically divided from the family and old friends who stayed. Her father was an abusive alcoholic; she delivered newspapers as a girl and left for college on a Pell Grant. Returning in 2020 while her mother was ill, she sensed that the town had hardened. Over two years of visits she interviewed relatives and townspeople, many at odds with her, plus experts, and uses Urbana as a microcosm of rural America's part in national polarization. She blames much of the division on Donald Trump's policies but finds older roots, with Democrats and the left sharing blame.

Barack Obama included it among his favorite books of 2025.