The Christiansburg Library welcomes bestselling author and journalist Beth Macy for a special evening today, Wednesday, Nov. 5, at 6 p.m.
Macy will discuss her powerful new memoir, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America. Copies of the book will be available for purchase through Blacksburg Books, and Macy will be signing books following the event.
Renowned for her vivid storytelling and deep empathy for outsiders and underdogs, Macy has spent her career illuminating the struggles and resilience of America’s overlooked communities. A longtime journalist for The Roanoke Times (1989–2014), Macy is now an acclaimed author whose works explore the social and economic forces shaping modern America.
She lives in Roanoke with her husband, Tom, and their rescue dog, Mavis. Raised in a small Ohio town, Macy was the first in her family to attend college—an experience she credits with changing, and perhaps saving, her life. After decades in newspapers, she pivoted to long-form nonfiction at age fifty, becoming the New York Times bestselling author of three groundbreaking books examining the human cost of globalization, addiction, and neglect.
Her debut, Factory Man, chronicled the decline of American manufacturing and earned the J. Anthony Lukas Prize. Her follow-up, Dopesick, a searing investigation of the opioid crisis, won the L.A. Times Book Prize for Science and Technology, was a Carnegie Medal finalist, and was hailed by The New York Times as “a masterwork of narrative nonfiction.” The book later inspired the Emmy and Peabody Award-winning Hulu series, for which Macy served as
executive producer and co-writer. Her most recent nonfiction work, Raising Lazarus, continues her urgent reporting on addiction and recovery in America.
In her latest release, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured
America (Penguin Press, October 7, 2025), Macy turns her lens inward. Blending personal memoir with investigative journalism, she examines the rural–urban divide through themes of family, backward mobility, political polarization, and the decline of local news. The book grew out of a deeply personal essay she wrote for The New York Times about her mother’s death.
Christiansburg Library is located at 125 Sheltman St., Christiansburg.
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