From Beth Macy ‘Love Persists’

From Beth Macy: Love Persists “if you tend it like a flame.” (And other lessions from from my “Paper Girl” tour.) Posted with permission from Beth Macy from her October 12, 2025 post. 

I’ve done six events and more than a dozen interviews in the few days since my book, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America, came out last week. And everywhere I’ve spoken, I’ve met readers who are desperate for advice on navigating America’s gaping political wounds and its descent into authoritarianism.

In Louisville, Ky., an Army veteran in his 80s came up to say he’d inhaled the book in a single day. “I’m so scared, I want to move to Portugal,” he said. “But we can’t afford it.”

Yesterday, at a Banned Books Festival in Des Moines, I was floored to hear that my favorite childhood book, Harriet the Spy, had been banned in Iowa “because, critics said, it celebrated defiance of young women,” an organizer told me. More than any other, that book seeded my writerly curiosity. And, yes, my defiance too.

In my home city of Roanoke, Va., for a live podcast that also featured my kid’s band Palmyra and University of Virginia professor Rachel Wahl, a woman described coming out as gay to her father—and receiving a stony silence in response. A week later, she started a Gay Straight Alliance chapter at her high school. Within a week, her taciturn dad placed a two-page letter on her pillow.

“He apologized for how his reaction and feelings alienated me and was proud I fought the principal and school board to support other people like me. He is a man of few words, and he filled the front and back of the page,” she said. “I still have that letter and I pull it out when he talks about his most recent conspiracy theory. He loves me, somewhere in there, he still loves me.”

Another woman described the estrangement she’d had with a dear childhood friend who stopped responding to her calls and texts based on their political differences—until she literally met her old friend where she was:

“In a last ditch effort to reconnect and make it clear that I simply love her—no strings—I joined a Facebook Live event she hosted to sell some kind of all natural household cleaning products through a personal sales scheme of some sort. It was a perfect indirect opening, we were able to resume our friendship, and I have weird bar soap for couch stains that REALLY works….”

According to a recent New York Times/Sienna poll, Americans now view our political divisions as the single-most important issueimpacting the country. Which makes the response to Paper Girl all the more poignant. None of us has easy answers, but it’s so important to try to sit with the questions and, in the words of the great Barbara Kingsolver, tend to our relationships, even the hard ones, like we “tend to a flame.”

I’m so grateful to reviewers at The New York Times, Washington Post, and elsewhere for overwhelmingly positive reviews. Leigh Haber, writing in the Post, said: “There couldn’t be a timelier book . . . In this venture, 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.”

Fourth-generation newspaper owner Douglas Burns wrote an incisive piece for the Iowa Mercury, and NBC’s estimable Kate Snow interviewed me for her show. I also spoke at length with NPR hosts Dave Davies of Fresh Air and Ailsa Chang of All Things Considered. I appreciated hometown coverage in Cardinal News by Mike Allen, Dan Casey in The Roanoke Times, and Jeff Bossert of WVTF.

The conversations are still happening (the rest of my tour can be found here)— including tomorrow’s free online event with Anna Quindlen via San Francisco’s Book Passage store, which I’m so stoked about! Register here to join us at 4 p.m. ET/1 p.m. PT.

Thanks to all the booksellers who’ve hosted events, especially Holland Saltsman of Novel Neighbor, a community gathering spot and sacred space in St. Louis.

And thanks to my amazing team at Penguin Press for taking such great care of me.

Thanks to all who have read the book and shared feedback and ideas—feel free to hit me up with your own stories of bridging the divide by replying to this message. (And if you haven’t yet, please leave your own review at Goodreads!)

And to everyone who reached out to donate money to Silas James, the “young me” profiled in the book and in my NYT excerpt, thanks so much. You can also help needy kids in my hometown by supporting the Urbana Youth Center here.