Beth Macy
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Beth Macy stood at a lectern in front of a little more than 50 people in the basement of the Historic Masonic Theatre in this small town some three and a half hours from Capitol Hill. She put her hands in her pockets and clasped them behind her back. She crossed her arms and looked down at her stapled printed pages.
“So,” she said, “you might know me …”
One need not be a citizen of the Appalachia-based 6th Congressional District of Virginia for that to be the case. For a certain class of book-reading American — the type with a taste for deeply reported stories about left-behind parts of the country — the woman running for this seat in the United States House is something of a household name. An award-winning reporter for the Roanoke Times for 25 years, she’s the author of five nonfiction books, including three of particular note: Factory Man, her critically acclaimed 2014 debut about globalization’s ravaging of Virginia’s furniture industry; Dopesick, a 2018 tome on America’s opioid crisis that turned into a Hulu series; and the recently released Paper Girl, a memoir about her own hardscrabble childhood and the plight of her fading Ohio hometown.
If she wins — a big if in a district that hasn’t elected a Democrat since 1990 — Macy, 61, will be the second writer of at least one bestselling book about hard-hit Appalachia to get elected to federal office. The first, of course, is former Ohio senator and current vice president JD Vance. Macy and Vance both grew up in hollowed-out factory towns in families marked by trauma and drama and drinking or drug-doing. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy proved to be a political launching pad; Macy’s books could be, too.
That, though, is about where the Vance-Macy Venn diagram ends. Vance’s lament for Appalachia ultimately set him on a trajectory to the political right, a rise propelled by titans of the tech industry. Macy’s undergirds a New Deal-style liberalism, a career fueled by patrons of up-market bookstores. The headline on a piece Macy once wrote for the New York Times: “I Grew Up Much Like JD Vance. How Did We End Up So Different?”
