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NPR's Book of the Day
'Paper Girl' and 'Joyride' are memoirs by journalists who get close to their subjects
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Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Chloe Weiner. Journalists are expected to maintain a certain distance from their subjects in order to stay objective, but in practice, that doesn't always happen, especially when it comes to long form in depth reporting. Today on the show, we'll hear two journalists think about the kind of intimacy they have with their subjects. In a bit. We'll hear from New Yorker writer Susan Orlean about where she found inspiration for some of her most famous stories like the Orchid Thief. But first, Beth Macy returns to her hometown, Urbana, Ohio, in her new memoir, Paper Girl. Over the years, she says she's felt changes there, changes that have resulted in higher rates of unemployment and addiction, but also divisive politics, which she's felt even with her own loved ones. And she tells NPR's Elsa Chang that she wanted to tell that story of change by finding a subject that was similar to herself. More after the break.
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Style, every Home Writer Beth Macy grew up in Urbana, Ohio, a place that was rich in diversity and community, even if she grew up in what she describes as a poor, dysfunctional family.
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It was a rough growing up. But I had one stable parent, which I really wanna point out, a grandmother next door that taught me how to read. It was like my own private head start. And I had really, really good teachers.
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Macy knew people on almost every block of every street. Her community helped raise her out of poverty and into a college education.
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One mom made me lunch every single day of school. Another friend took me to school every day. Yet another friend brought me home from softball practice, which allowed me to do all the things other college going kids were going to do.
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But she has watched Urbana go from a town with stable factory jobs and good schools in the 1970s and 80s to a place bearing the heavy weight of unemployment, addiction and plummeting graduation rates. Macy is now an award winning author and journalist and for her new memoir, Paper Girl, she returns to her hometown to understand why Urbana has transformed so dramatically and what Urbana can tell us about this country. I asked Macy when did she first notice the changes in her hometown?
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I first noticed it in my family, just a lot of division. And we never used to talk about politics, but around when Trump was elected, my brother Tim unfriended me on Facebook because of, quote, all the liberal crap you post. And we had been very close. And then kind of the pinnacle moment happened at my mom's deathbed in 2020. It happened to be the Saturday after the election. And I was sitting with the hospice nurse and my evangelical sister, who had previously never spoken of politics. And the nurse's phone blinged, and she goes, ugh, they're calling it for Biden. And my sister said, you wait, it's fraudulent. He won't win. And mom is literally laying in her deathbed going, you know, she could die at any moment. And I just thought, oh, my goodness, what has happened? I had noticed in my hometown, which was a hotbed of abolitionist activity and an underground railroad haven, but there were now Confederate flags flying. And after mom died, I just thought, what has happened to my family, my hometown, and my country? And so I decided to go back and try to figure out what had caused the changes.
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That was a central question. And it wasn't just a shift in political attitudes that you were trying to explain. You write that unprecedented forces which were actively turning the community I loved into a poorer, sicker, angrier, and less educated place. And I wanna talk about that with respect to a particular person who started your book, Silas James. I mean, you talk about how stark the contrast was between the Urbana you grew up in compared to the one that Silas grew up in. Can you talk about how your paths seem so similar in some ways, but they were so divergent?
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Yeah. So I did a lot of reporting just to find a, quote, young me for the book, and talked to teachers and counselors, and I said, I want a promising poor kid. They all pointed to him. You know, he had grown up in a family with addiction. His father had died of a drug overdose. His mother was in and out of prison, and he didn't have one stable parent. And so what I saw in Silas's story was just a whole nother level of trauma and abuse. He had been abused by a caregiver at a young age. And that all sort of dovetails. Once I did the research and I saw that, you know, foster care had tripled since 2015 in Urbana. The number of emergency calls for mental health crises had gone up by a factor of nine in the 40 years since I had left. And yet Silas, kind of like me, managed to grab onto these teachers who were real beacons in his life. That sort of made a way for him.
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And another divergence between you and Silas, you got a pell grant to attend college. And now kids like Silas, they don't have that same chance because the purchasing power of the pell grant has radically declined. Right. How do you see that affecting the educational opportunities of poor Americans now?
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Oh, it's so huge. I mean, basically we have taken a four year college degree away from poor kids or even lower middle class kids, and we've said either go to the community college or take out loans, which is really dire for even middle class families. Right. So when I went, the whole thing was paid for, even my books, room and board tuition. I got work study jobs so I could buy pizza and beer just like everybody else. And when Silas went, he had all of his tuition covered. But because he went to a community college, there was no money for him to like, move out of his house and live nearby the college. And the college was an hour away, which meant he had to have reliable transportation. And I watched that poor kid, he dropped out the first week because his car died. And then once he got re enrolled, I watched him go through five clunker cars in the course of a ten month program.
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God, I can't imagine. Well, when you were young, you had a paper route, hence the title of this book, paper girl. And you've since had a decorated career as a journalist. And a lot of your book deals with the spread of misinformation and growing contempt for journalists. Can I ask you, like, because I think about this question. What does it feel like to be a member of a profession that many people in your own hometown, many people in the country probably distrust?
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It feels painful. My first friend, I've known her since kindergarten, she conducted my mom's funeral. This is how much I love her. She's the one who gave me a ride to school every day. She said, I hate the media. All of this is the media's fault. And I said, joy, I am the media. And when I write a piece for the New York Times or the Washington Post, it is fact checked to the nth degree. And at one point she raised her voice to me and she said, who fact checks the fact checkers. And I said, joy, fact checks, facts are facts. Like, you know, I was just astonished to hear that. And she just like my sister Cookie, the one who said the election was fraudulent, she lives in an entirely different news ecosystem. Than I believe in. And it felt personal when people were saying, you know, you lie.
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Well, then let me ask you a question that a lot of us here at NPR are asking. How do we get people to care more about fact based journalism? How do we persuade the people we're losing to come back and seek truthful information?
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Well, I think we need to pay more attention to what's happening in these rural areas. Right. More stories about them. We need to start to build back legacy media institutions. I mean, where I live in Roanoke, Virginia, when I first came to work at the paper in 1989, we had 60 some reporters. Now they have six. So think about all the things that aren't being covered at the same time. You've got these like really hardworking, sort of demoralized final few reporters and then people attack them. It's just terrible. But I think we have to keep telling the stories. And one of the things I came away with from the book is we have to start with our families. As hard as it is to have these conversations, you know, that is maybe the people we'll have the best chance with. Talking across the dividend.
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Beth Macy's new book is called Paper A Memoir of Home and Family in Fractured America. Thank you so much, Beth. It was such a pleasure to talk to you.
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Thank you, Elsa.
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Susan Orlean is known for her deep dives into unusual worlds. Orchid enthusiasts, umbrella inventors, origami artists. And so it was surprising to hear her talk about the ways she sometimes becomes seduced by her subjects. And she told NPR's Scott Simon that it's easy for her to become romanced by the adventure itself. Here's Scott.
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Susan Orleans says the story of my life is the story of my stories. But she's put parts of her own life into a memoir of her career as an esteemed long form journalism storyteller. Her decades at the New Yorker and her books, the Orchid Thief, the Library Book, Rin Tin Tin and more. Susan Orlean joins us now from Rhinebeck, New York. Her new memoir, Joyride. Thanks so much for being with us.
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Thank you so much for Having me, of course.
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I want to ask you about a number of your most celebrated stories. Herbert, the Nearsighted Pigeon.
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Yes, this was my first published work. I was the publisher, I was the author, I was the illustrator, and I was the distributor. In other words, I wrote this when I was 5 years old. This was a story about a pigeon who suddenly has become estranged from his friends. He doesn't understand why.
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Boy, at five years old, an estranged pigeon.
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Even at that age, I had this impulse to put stories down on paper.
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You discovered later in life that your. Your father, who was a lawyer and real estate developer, had actually dreamed of becoming a writer. Was that a spark that passed? What happened?
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I think what happened is my father grew up during the Depression. Being a lawyer had the security of a professional license, a training, a career path. But my father always lived in the world with the curiosity of a writer. He liked taking us to different neighborhoods in Cleveland. That when I was growing up, people didn't travel from the suburbs into the downtown of Cleveland. It was not typical. He liked talking to strangers. He liked talking to every kind of stranger. Somebody highly placed in society and someone very much down on their luck. He had an appetite for learning and discovering and exploring. I think it traveled intact from him to me.
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Hmm. Rajneeshpuram. This was a community founded by Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh in the early 80s. As I recall, you were working for Willamette Week, but you went there to cover the story for the Village Voice. What did you learn from an encounter with Swami Devav Wolfgang?
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I learned early on how easy it is to become seduced by your subject. What I do is immerse myself into these new worlds that I want to write about. Immersing yourself, by definition, almost means you go into it open heartedly and with a really sincere interest in learning what this world is all about. And it is very easy to begin losing the objectivity of being a reporter.
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You.
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You're kind of romanced by the adventure itself.
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We should explain. Group of people who had separated from society at large.
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And no, no prohibitions. It was fine to be rich. It was fine to drink and smoke. And I absolutely, you know, the honey caught the fly. In this case, enough so that I started to feel myself losing perspective. Luckily, I had the wherewithal to stop myself and say, wait a minute, I see what's going on here. I need to distance myself emotionally a little bit and not let the romance of the moment overwhelm me.
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You say at one point that you don't like reporting that Relies on coded shorthand that doesn't consider the nuance in a story and that supposes readers share an assumption.
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It's the thing that I that gets under my skin the most, which is we drop these kind of code phrases and assume everybody knows what that means. During the period after the Oklahoma City bombing And after Timothy McVeigh was arrested, it was mentioned in a lot of profiles of him that he lived in a trailer park. I began feeling like, why do we assume that we know what that means? So I set out to write a story about life in a trailer park, and it was absolutely fascinating. Some of it confirmed my assumptions. Some of it absolutely did not confirm my assumptions. But more importantly, I feel like that's the role of a storyteller, to take these packed phrases and unpack them and look at them more deeply and get them to the humanity behind them so that they become more than just this phrase that we drop on a page.
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Susan, how did you encounter the extraordinary world of orchid enthusiasts?
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It is indeed an extraordinary world. This was a lucky accident. I was flying home from Miami, and I had finished the book that I brought to read on the plane. So I started digging around in the seat pocket, and someone had left a copy of the Miami Herald. Way back in the front section, there was this little headline that caught my eye that said, a local nurseryman and crew of Seminoles arrested with rare orchids in swamp.
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That's quite. Yes, I can see what it caught your eye.
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Yeah, it just was like I have never seen these words together in one sentence. And it was a brief mention of this man, John Labroche, who had been arrested with his crew of Seminoles in a swamp that I had never heard of. A state preserve in Florida, and they had four pillowcases full of orchids. I didn't know orchids grew wild in south Florida. I didn't know that people collected orchids. I thought if you wanted an orchid, you went to Home Depot and bought one. Every sentence in this short piece had me hungry for more, and I immediately headed back to Florida to go to the hearing. And after I published a piece for the New Yorker, I thought, there's more here. I want to write a book about it.
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Of course, the Orchid Thief, 1998 book wound up inspiring the film adaptation about a screenwriter who couldn't figure out how to adapt the book into a screenplay. Did the fact that you approach this with interest but not a lot of knowledge help you?
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I think the lack of knowledge is a superpower. It brings for me this voraciousness to learn to gobble up this world that I'm plunging into. It helps me, even though it's humbling to say, how do orchids have babies? And have the head of the orchid society give you a look that is like, oh, my God, we're gonna have to really explain things to her. That's okay. I also feel like in that case, I'm a proxy for my reader. I am going through what they're going to go through when they read my piece, which is to say, wait, wait, wait, explain to me what is this all about?
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Susan Orlean's new memoir, Joyride. Thank you so much for being with us.
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Oh, thank you so much, Scott.
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That's it for this week on NPR's Book of the Day. If you want more, you can sign up for our newsletter@npr.org Newsletter Books. I'm Chloe Weiner. The podcast is produced by me and edited by Megan Sullivan. Our founding editor is Petra Mair. The show elements for this week were produced and edited by Sarah Robbins, Avery Keatley, Adriana Gallardo, Taylor, Haney, Mansi, Khurana Rzu Rezvani, Jeanette Woods, Janaki Mehta, Shannon Rhodes and Samantha Balaban. Yolanda Sanguini is our executive producer. Thanks for listening.
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