As Macy gets to know the various inhabitants of Urbana, she stumbles on a series of individuals who have remained committed to a community that refuses to fully accept them. In addition to Silas, she meets Brooke Perry, a truancy officer who isn’t afraid to get up close and personal with students who are skipping school, and spends time with Mark Evans, an amateur historian who wants to teach the town about its role in the Underground Railroad. All three struggle to come to terms with the way the other residents of Urbana treat them. At one point, Macy realizes that she doesn’t even think of Silas as trans—although while applying for jobs, he must consider the possibility of being outed when handing over his mismatched identification for payroll enrollment. (Not every trans person is able to get I.D.s that match their gender identity, especially in red states.) Macy’s own family, meanwhile, struggles to accept both Macy’s gay son and her nonbinary child.
Some of this homophobia stems from religious fervor, but the research peppered throughout “Paper Girl” also suggests that globalization and austere economic policies are some of the key contributors to political polarization. Simmering aggressions have to go somewhere, and minorities often become the targets; they are easy scapegoats, simply for being an “other.” The “others” are taking jobs, seducing daughters, and sowing discontent. The majority can then take on the posture of a victim, fearing for their physical and economic safety. This is the basic recipe for civil war—one youth-center volunteer even jokes to Macy about America going the way of “The Hunger Games.”
Does knowing this, however, lead to actual understanding? Despite all her research—and even after seeking professional advice about how to speak with her sister—Macy does not have much success reaching across the aisle to her family. She wonders how Silas can stand it. He marches on; a metalhead, he gets a System of a Down tattoo. He even tries to help Macy reconcile with her intolerant sister. “Here he was, counseling me,” she writes. “And it helped.” The conversations Macy has in this book—both with her family and others in MAGA world—are fascinating, but never entirely fruitful; she does not close the growing divide, nor does she even narrow it, despite providing a stirring and muscular vision of compassion. Rather than blame the people of Urbana for their scorn, she places the blame on a demagogue who has dialled up strife and discord in the country for his own greedy ends. There is some naïveté, perhaps even some wishful thinking, in Macy suggesting that most of this is Trump’s fault, as she does at the end of her book. Her more compelling argument is that the one-per-centers are squeezing out the middle class. By excluding low-wage families from college education and other opportunities, they’re removing “the ladder of upward mobility,” as she writes. “They took away the thing that soothes misery and distress; they took away their hope.”
Early on in “Paper Girl,” Macy declares the book a love story—or at least, her version of one. The book reads more like a letter left behind to the next generation, one with many ideas and few real solutions. Extending grace is easier said than done. But Macy offers some advice: “The answer to our epidemic of loneliness isn’t to seek solace in conspiracy theories; it’s to participate in real life with other human beings, including those we don’t know.” It’s not a ladder, but it might be a bridge. ♦
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