Although “Paper Girl” is partly centered on Macy’s struggles to reconnect with her family, the star of the book is a young trans man named Silas, whom she befriends. His inclusion could come across as a cynical ploy, a way of measuring social progress in a backward town. But Macy’s interactions with Silas, and his role in the book, feel organic; she does not reduce him to his gender. Silas meets Macy at a crucial point in his life. After scraping by in high school, he’s trying to keep up at college while working as a welder, and he’s looking after his siblings, who have been removed from the care of his drug-addicted mother. Macy worries he may never graduate. She is astounded by the sheer amount of hustling required in Silas’s daily life. She documents the socioeconomic factors working against him—his inability to get financial support for school, the lack of well-paying jobs available, the number of family members battling addiction, and the eternal challenges of getting reliable transportation. But his resilience continually surprises Macy, who suspects she would not have had the same endurance as the new generation. She encounters many children who are hoping to make it big on social-media apps like TikTok—who see fame as their ticket out of a life in which they’re working multiple jobs and will never make enough money to go to a “good” college. For some of these kids, college attendance is actively discouraged by their parents, who fear that if their children do end up leaving, they may never come back. Or, worse: they’ll come back changed. “It’s no longer just whether you can afford college,” one former senator’s aide tells Macy. “It’s the whole ‘If you go to college, you’ll leave home, move to a city, and you’ll turn into a liberal.’ ” Macy cites a statistic: one in five Americans has lost touch with loved ones over their politics. She wonders who is more brittle, less able to reach across the divide, liberals or conservatives?

Macy’s own youth was hardly idyllic, even if she was ultimately able to get a good education and move up to a higher class. She attributes this to a few key factors—a mix of personal and public infrastructure that no longer exists: her supportive and fiercely loyal mother, now deceased; the funding she received from the federal Pell Grant program, now gutted; and robust local journalism, now decimated. Macy acknowledges that she was always a “striver,” but, back then, it was easier to strive. For good students facing economic hardship, the Pell Grant was a godsend. The program began in 1973, but, over the years, it has been kneecapped by politicians, who have argued that it is too much like welfare. College tuition, meanwhile, has only become more expensive. Macy wonders if she could even get a job in local journalism today, given the meagre number of newspapers that are still offering full-time positions. It’s an issue that she’s personally invested in, but the problem has broader ramifications: Macy draws a link between the collapse of local journalism and the rising number of people who take refuge in online conspiracy theories. Even the journalism that remains is often behind a paywall, she notes, contributing to the isolation of communities who need trustworthy news sources the most.

Like Naomi Klein’s “Doppelganger,” which thinks through digital mirror worlds and online radicalization, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “The Message,” which examines the role of storytelling in shaping—and distorting—histories of racism, Macy’s book analyzes how the political right has deflected blame and embraced victimhood in the wake of Trump’s rise to power. But Macy doesn’t let the left off the hook, either—she knows that rural communities have good reason to feel aggrieved, and that, too often, Democrats have ignored the important role that class plays in such aggrievement. Inflation is rising, jobs are going overseas, and rents aren’t getting any lower. Downplaying these issues, the way that Democrats did on the campaign trail—or, as Macy puts it, “living in Kamala la-la land”—only exacerbated the preëxisting tensions between rural populations and urban élites. Macy, like Klein and Coates, toggles between personal narrative, history, and reportage to weave together a surprisingly moving account of how politics can rupture the personal. This technique, sometimes referred to as the braided essay, is divisive, with critics arguing that it’s essentially a stylistic crutch: a way for writers to pad otherwise weak or flimsy work with something that feels more substantive. Yet Macy demonstrates the genre’s elastic power, collating large amounts of information into a cogent and thrilling story—a history lesson made more easily digestible as memoir, rather than a memoir with forced-in historical passages. Macy is a surprisingly empathetic narrator, seeking to find common ground with QAnon conspiracists and Second Amendment fundamentalists, without ever minimizing her own beliefs. She has long, in-depth discussions with her detractors, all the while insisting on the humanity of trans kids and migrants. Her conversations are heated, but never stilted; she refuses to foreclose the possibility of redemption, always searching for some element of compatibility. She even admonishes liberals who say the New York Times was too soft on Trump. “Come on,” she moans.