Urbana, Ohio, is a small city of 11,000, where nearly three out of four voters went for Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election. The journalist Beth Macy, who in her previous books chronicled the widening fissures in American society by examining the opioid crisis and the aftereffects of globalization, grew up there. In Paper Girl, she returns to Urbana—a place beset by economic decline, dwindling public resources, failing schools, and the disappearance of local journalism. These descriptions might feel familiar, like an update of J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. Vance, as it turns out, grew up just an hour down the road.

But unlike Vance, who blamed much of his hometown’s misfortune on its residents, Macy approaches the Urbana of 2023 with an open mind. She wants to understand what happened. Her focus is less on the reason for the decline than on the question of why people—even close family members—stopped talking with one another. How is it that Americans with disagreements are unable even to find the language to converse? With that in mind, Macy seeks to do something seemingly simple but actually profound: talk with people she knows, even if they seem to live in a different reality, and try to find a common humanity.

Read: Hillbilly excuses

She visits with family and old friends, some of whom share her view of the wor