Going home to find hope, from Berry and Macy
As the publishing gods probably, at least not publicly, could not have imagined, two powerful stories of memory, set in the margins of Appalachia, about the demise of family, community and the rural economy, were both released on Tuesday, October 7, 2025. Readers are the beneficiaries, in that these stories of hope might be a path out of the present troubling times.
Wendell Berry’s latest, the fictional-though-certainly-autobiographical Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story; and Beth Macy’s fourth book, Paper Girl, A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America, lament the same loss. Both recognize through family and keen observation of their home community what has transpired, and the cost our society and culture are paying now and into the future.
Berry’s novel, coming at age 91, is part and parcel of his ongoing Port William membership, the fictional name for a very real place along the Kentucky River north-west of Louisville. Macy’s memoir revolves around her growing up in Urbana, Ohio, west of Columbus, just 150 miles northeast of Berry’s birthplace. And while a full generation also separates the two writers, two sets of eyes on the same story connect us all to a very familiar place of despair.
Andy Catlett, the protagonist and keeper of Berry’s story, preserves his family’s history of the last century, of tobacco farmers exploited by early 20th century monopolist, James Duke. Andy’s grandfather, Marce, returns home from selling his annual crop of burley tobacco in 1907 with barely enough money to cover the expense of the trip to the auction. As is true of Berry’s agricultural vision, if it weren’t for a diversified farm economy and dependence on sustenance, the Catlett story of place might have ended then.
The story of the tobacco economy is as complicated, sadly, as any commodity in American agriculture, but uniquely entrenched by the incredible number of man-hours necessary to raise and sell an acre of the leaf. Tobacco–pre-industrialization, say 1949–Berry notes, needed 460 hours per acre, while more conventional crops such as wheat and corn required 5 and 19 hours, respectively. Berry, writing from personal experience, notes that those man-hours equated “a work of art, an artistry.” And of knitting together a cohesive community of neighbors and family.
For a time through the middle part of the 20th century, the tobacco growing regions benefitted from federal policy measures, of which Berry’s family was intimately involved, as are the characters in his novels and short stories. This celebration is short-lived, brought down by the inevitable emergence of the industrial farm–the machinery, chemicals and corporations–which thrive on scale and displacement of the cost of labor, while thriving on a pretzel logic of governmental subsidy.
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Macy has touched on this diminishment in earlier books, beginning with Factory Man, and then with her hard-hitting critique of the pharmaceutical exploitation of addiction, preying upon a vulnerable population already beat-down by other economic forces beyond their own sovereignty.
This new triptych of personal memoir on the fracturing of American family and community values, the demise of the once-trusted local news media, and the privatization of education paints the untold story–particularly the downfall of the Pell grant, which had enabled her own debt-free four-year degree in the mid-1980s–of why our society has become so polarized today.
“The ability to earn a bachelor’s degree is one of the single most important factors protecting Americans against deaths from addiction, poverty, and hopelessness,” what economists call “the deaths of despair,” she writes. More concerningly, “Deaths of despair are disproportionately concentrated in places where misinformation spreads rampantly-in high-poverty communities with low college education attainment, scarce access to local doctors, and scant local news.”
Macy pounds the beat in her old home town, with teachers, truancy officers, law enforcement, doctors and judges. “When you’re working class, good schools and social connections are sustenance. I’d never given it much thought before, but now that I was back in Urbana for long stretches and looking beyond its Mayberry facade, I realized I was seeing what happens to a town that loses many of its crucial lifelines.”
Or, as a former high school classmate, and now a police captain in Urbana tells Macy, “It’s that loss of grit. It’s mental health, parents inability to parent, general population decline.”
As Berry’s concluding paragraph intimates, his work is both a “benediction” and a “requiem,” his remembrance. It must be his life-long hope that through story-telling, succeeding generations will remember, preserve, and honor the past, and carry values forward no matter how complicated and compromised surrounding systems and institutions make them.
For Macy, on the other hand, it’s “deep canvassing.” While supporting new forms of local news media, her antidote for bridging the fractured family and community begins with “having nonjudgmental conversations.” Or going fishing with her brother, who had once unfriended her over “all of the liberal sh*t you post,” some of it written in national media by Macy herself.
The rising triple whammy of modernization, corporatization, and profit-mongering are ultimately behind all of the curses these two fine writers analyze. While the scale of this inevitable biggering and biggering seems impassable, Berry and Macy, in telling their familiar stories, offer us more than their mutual hope for the rest of us. Going, or rather, coming home, and doing the hard work to repair our frayed institutions, is central to their vision. The joint publishing of these two books is testimony to the need for just this reminder.
