It's very common to find talk in the literature on first-gen students of schisms between students and their families as students learn new ways of thinking and speaking and feel that they no longer fit in with family and friends back home. I've always been curious that this literature just takes these these tensions for granted as quirks of personality or individual family dynamics. This literature so rarely considers class antagonisms as context for shifts in trust and understanding between poor and working-class families and their upwardly mobile children.
A new book by journalist Beth Macy explores the contexts of growing schisms between the the educated and those without degrees via both professional and personal lenses.
Macy grew up poor in small town Ohio as the "daughter of the town drunk" and a mother who worked multiple factory jobs. She did relatively well in school and then left for college at Bowling Green State University in 1982, funded almost fully by Pell grants and work study jobs.
Now a journalist and book author, Macy returned for extended visits to her hometown just before the 2024 election to try to better understand the "unprecedented forces that were actively turning a place I loved into a poorer, sicker, angrier, and less educated place". Beneath those questions of place are also deeply felt questions of who she now is to her family, as those extended visits included caring for her dying mother along with her siblings.
In Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America , she writes of reconnecting with friends, classmates, and family across growing divides of class, education, and politics. She spends weeks immersing herself back in her hometown, talking to teachers, old friends, local social service workers, and family to try to better understand her town where few young people now go to college. She writes of the decimated Pell Grant program, closed factories, underfunded schools, and the demise of local media (she'd been the town papergirl as a child) so that neighbors no longer knew about one another even as they were awash in polarized national messaging and online conspiracy theories. She writes of the "country club set" and others in the town who know little about one another.
And beneath many of her conversations is family and friends' suspicion of her as a college-educated liberal who left to live and work elsewhere. She is still the person who knew everyone on her paper route, was the drum major of the high school band, and can share beers with old classmates at old haunts. They trust her with many of the stories of their lives but distrust who she now is. She writes of their Trump parades and local politics with equal measures of frustration and compassion, even as siblings and former friends turn on her because of the "side" she represents.
Macy writes that she has long been aware that she's one of the few journalists from a rural working-class backgrounds in any professional room she is in. She listens, invokes shared memories as she reconnects with people, and contextualizes what she hears as she writes within broader national discourse. She writes of family estrangement around politics and religion, declining opportunity, and anger fueled by immersion in right-wing media.
Here, she speaks with journalist Andrea Pitzer at Politics and Prose about her hometown, family, and a national politics of anger and destruction:
Paper Girl is a powerful book of coming to terms with "home" being a much poorer version of what it had been, about loving family and friends who are suspicious of your core values, and about the work restoring trust between those who stay and those who leave.
Every single sentence makes clear how difficult it is bridge the divides she so carefully documents. Macy makes clear that tensions between families and their college-educated children may be experienced as private troubles, yet are also public issues that are resolved only via informed public policy. We'd do well to ensure that more first-gen students learn much more about the "unprecendented forces" that are weakening so many of their communities.
