{"id":2533,"date":"2025-12-30T14:06:18","date_gmt":"2025-12-30T14:06:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/?p=2533"},"modified":"2025-12-30T14:06:18","modified_gmt":"2025-12-30T14:06:18","slug":"shes-written-bestsellers-about-appalachian-struggles-shes-running-for-office-but-dont-compare-her-to-jd-vance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/?p=2533","title":{"rendered":"She\u2019s Written Bestsellers About Appalachian Struggles. She\u2019s Running for Office. But Don\u2019t Compare Her to JD Vance."},"content":{"rendered":"

CLIFTON FORGE, Virginia \u2014<\/strong>\u00a0Beth 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo,\u201d she said, \u201cyou might know me \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 the type with a taste for deeply reported stories about left-behind parts of the country \u2014 the woman running for this seat in the United States House is something of a household name. An award-winning reporter for the\u00a0Roanoke Times\u00a0<\/em>for 25 years, she\u2019s the author of five nonfiction books, including three of particular note:\u00a0Factory Man<\/em>, her critically acclaimed 2014 debut about globalization\u2019s ravaging of Virginia\u2019s furniture industry;\u00a0Dopesick<\/em>, a 2018 tome on America\u2019s opioid crisis that turned into a Hulu series; and the recently released\u00a0Paper Girl<\/em>, a memoir about her own hardscrabble childhood and the plight of her fading Ohio hometown.<\/p>\n

If she wins \u2014 a big if in a district that hasn\u2019t elected a Democrat since 1990 \u2014 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\u2019s\u00a0Hillbilly Elegy<\/em> proved to be a political launching pad; Macy\u2019s books could be, too.<\/p>\n

That, though, is about where the Vance-Macy Venn diagram ends. Vance\u2019s lament for Appalachia ultimately set him on a trajectory to the political right, a rise propelled by titans of the tech industry. Macy\u2019s undergirds a New Deal-style liberalism, a career fueled by patrons of up-market bookstores. The headline on a piece Macy once\u00a0wrote for the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>: \u201cI Grew Up Much Like JD Vance. How Did We End Up So Different?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cShe\u2019s the opposite of JD Vance,\u201d the bestselling Appalachian writer Silas House told me.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe is,\u201d said Shannon Anderson, a sociologist at Roanoke College who is friends with Macy, \u201cwhat JD Vance could have been.\u201d<\/p>\n

Vance, one imagines, is quite content with that. Today, after all, less than a decade after the release of his book, he is not only Donald Trump\u2019s vice president but his potential Oval Office heir. Macy, on the other hand, 11 years after her first big seller, is still \u201cjust\u201d the best journalist who lives in in southwest Virginia.<\/p>\n

Macy is, she stressed here more than once, \u201cnot a politician\u201d \u2014 a useful thing to be able to say in the maiden candidacy of any would-be politician. Turning her candidacy into an actual spot in Congress figures to be a tall task. In a district that shoots north from Roanoke to the Loudoun County line along Interstate 81 and the Appalachians, she\u2019s pitted against two other Democrats in next June\u2019s primary \u2014 the winner of which gets to go up against a four-term incumbent in the Trump-endorsed Ben Cline. Potential mid-decade, Democratic-led redistricting could rejigger the map, but as it stands it\u2019s a piece of political terrain that\u2019s dependably elected a Republican for more than 30 years.<\/p>\n

Macy is positioned ideologically as a socially progressive economic populist \u2014 a kind of new-era New Dealer who lives in a semi-urban speck of blue surrounded by so many shades of suburban and rural red. Her fledgling platform to my ear stems straight from the sort of super-story she\u2019s been stitching together in her books \u2014 a \u201ccrisis of opportunity,\u201d as she calls it, the wreckage wrought in small towns and rural regions by the consequences of the diminishment of the social safety net in the 1980s, the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 and the inclusion of China in the World Trade Organization in 2001, a series of policy decisions made by Republican and Democratic administrations alike that have made life easier for the people with the most and harder for the people with the least.<\/p>\n

And, as with Vance, it\u2019s personal. Macy was the poor daughter of an alcoholic father and an assembly-line-worker mother and believes she almost certainly could not have gotten where she\u2019s gotten without the lifeblood of federal aid that\u2019s dwindled to the point of sometimes disappeared. \u201cWhat changed so much since I grew up and left home 40 years ago? During that time, I watched as the measures that lifted me out of poverty,\u00a0that ladder<\/em>\u00a0\u2026 got yanked back up,\u201d Macy told the audience.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve interviewed hundreds of people in Appalachia and in the Roanoke and Shenandoah valleys. I told their stories \u2014 your stories \u2014 and you know what I\u2019ve learned?\u201d she said. \u201cThe people in charge don\u2019t give a damn.\u201d<\/p>\n

The crowd responded with murmurs of affirmation.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m done writing about it,\u201d Macy told them. \u201cIt\u2019s time to do something about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Journalists and intellectuals\u00a0<\/strong>who hop the fence into electoral politics \u2014 a population much rarer in the U.S. than elsewhere \u2014 oftentimes develop a whole new persona once they switch roles. But Macy\u2019s running the way she\u2019s running because of the way she\u2019s reported and written \u2014 as she put it to me, \u201cground up.\u201d And she\u2019s reported and written \u201cground up\u201d because of the way she grew up.<\/p>\n

In Urbana, Ohio, population approximately 11,000, her mother worked the second shift at a factory soldering strobe lights for airplanes and her World War II veteran father was a sporadically employed housepainter with a seventh-grade education and an insatiable taste for beer. Her grandmother taught her to read when she was 4. She delivered the local newspaper, tossing the\u00a0Urbana Daily Citizen<\/em>\u00a0from her Huffy bike. In their house with roaches on the floor and mildew on the walls, she rubbed her mother\u2019s aching neck. She got from her favorite teacher at school a copy of the children\u2019s novel\u00a0Harriet the Spy<\/em>\u00a0and read it and re-read it and mimicked its main character, hiding in the lilacs on her block,\u00a0she once said, \u201csafe and unseen \u2026 bearing witness to the beautiful and the strange, the just and unjust.\u201d<\/p>\n

Macy went to Bowling Green State University only because of Pell Grants that still paid the whole cost for her tuition and room and board and books. She worked three work-study jobs for pocket money. She had by graduation in 1986 a degree in journalism and a 15-year-old blue Volkswagen Beetle on which she put a bumper sticker that said, \u201cThe Moral Majority Is Neither.\u201d<\/p>\n

She worked for two years at a newspaper in Savannah, Georgia, before arriving in Roanoke in 1989. She was drawn to stories that resonated with how she saw her own. She was less interested,\u00a0as she once wrote, in \u201cwhite-guys-in-ties\u201d \u2014 she wanted to write about the outsiders and underdogs. She wrote about laid-off furniture workers and Mexican and Somali immigrants and a Black girl named Salena Sullivan who was raised by a single mother and the nurturing staff of a public library who ended up getting accepted to Harvard. \u201cThat\u2019s one of Beth\u2019s cheat codes,\u201d said\u00a0Jared Soares, a photographer who worked with her in Roanoke, \u201cher ability to relate to underrepresented individuals.\u201d<\/p>\n

Factory Man<\/em>\u00a0came out in 2014. It was based in part on a series she did for the\u00a0Roanoke Times<\/em>\u00a0about the ill effects of NAFTA and China on the region\u2019s erstwhile furniture hubs. Politicians left and right hailed free trade. \u201cBut as the daughter of a displaced factory worker,\u201d Macy wrote, \u201cI wondered about the dinghies being sunk by globalization\u2019s rising tide.\u201d She\u00a0got rave reviews. And when Trump won in 2016, she started getting calls from other reporters suddenly eager to better understand how it happened. \u201cMore than anything, I believe Donald Trump won the election \u2026 because Democrats and journalists failed to grasp and report on the aftermath of globalization in small towns across America,\u201d\u00a0she wrote on her blog the week after he won. \u201cBut what I really wanted to say to them,\u201d she said of the reporters who called her, \u201cwas this: Why are you just now getting around to writing this story? \u2026 Across America, dying factory towns held unemployment-rate records for more than a decade. \u2026 Democrats and most of the American media ignored what was happening in rural America until the morning after the election.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dopesick<\/em>\u00a0came out in 2018. She aimed, she wrote, to \u201cretrace the epidemic as it shape-shifted across the spine of the Appalachians, roughly paralleling Interstate 81 as it fanned out from the coalfields and crept north up the Shenandoah Valley\u201d \u2014 describing roughly the district in which she\u2019s now running. \u201cLee County,\u201d\u00a0she wrote of one of the epicenters of the scourge\u00a0in which she spent years reporting, \u201cwas the ultimate flyover region, hard to access by car, full of curvy two-lane roads, and dotted with rusted-out coal tipples. It was the precise point in America where politicians were least likely to hold campaign rallies or pretend to give a shit \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

Inevitably, her subject-matter expertise led to prompts to talk about Vance, yuppie America\u2019s other favorite explainer of rural alienation. She\u00a0wrote in the\u00a0Oxford American<\/em>\u00a0in 2018\u00a0of \u201cthe victim-blaming bootstrap narrative espoused in JD Vance\u2019s best-selling book.\u201d She wondered in\u00a0a piece in the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0in 2020\u00a0if she had stayed in her hometown if she\u2019d have grown \u201cangry enough about my crumbling community to vote for a man like Donald Trump.\u201d She said in\u00a0an interview with the Times in 2022\u00a0that\u00a0Hillbilly Elegy<\/em>\u00a0\u201cmakes me angry every time I think about it\u201d \u2014 that Vance \u201cblamed Appalachians\u2019 woes on a crisis of masculinity and lack of thrift, overlooking the centuries of rapacious behavior on the part of out-of-state coal and pharma companies, and the bought-off politicians who failed to regulate them, and he took his stereotype-filled false narratives to the bank.\u201d Vance,\u00a0Macy wrote in another piece in the\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0in 2024, \u201cturned his back on the things that helped make him who he is \u2014 public schools, public college and Ivy League opportunities.\u201d<\/p>\n

Vance through a spokesman declined to comment for this story.<\/p>\n

Paper Girl,\u00a0<\/em>Macy\u2019s reported account of her own life and others in Urbana, came out in October. \u201cThe more time I spent back in my hometown, the more I recognized the unprecedented forces that were actively turning the community I loved into a poorer, sicker, angrier, and less educated place,\u201d\u00a0she wrote. Urbana, she wrote, was \u201ca microcosm of the county\u2019s larger failures to address the collapsing economic order brought on by global trade, the transfer of control from public to private, and the growing impotence of what was once a free, fair, and fact-checked local press.\u201d She said Ronald Reagan \u201chad systemically shifted our federal financial-aid apparatus from being need based to greed based.\u201d She said Bill Clinton was guilty of \u201cupping the game to prove his \u2018new Democrat\u2019 bona fides. She called Trump \u201cthe consummate showman\u201d who \u201cconned most voters into thinking he cared\u201d when he \u201ccared more about staying out of prison.\u201d She called Vance \u201cthe hillbilly huckster.\u201d She also said some Democrats were living in \u201cKamala\u201d Harris \u201cla-la-land\u201d \u2014 \u201ctoo insulated,\u201d she said, \u201cto understand the utter rage provoked by globalization,\u201d the \u201cwidespread rural despair.\u201d And toward the end she urged readers to \u201ctouch grass,\u201d \u201ctake a walk with a friend,\u201d \u201chelp mutual aid groups,\u201d \u201csupport local news\u201d \u2014 and to \u201crun for local office.\u201d<\/p>\n

Macy didn\u2019t just dish out advice. She followed it, stepping outside the traditional don\u2019t-get-involved rules of journalism. She started going to weekly protests outside the downtown Roanoke office of their congressman, where she met so many Democratic activists she started to become one. One of them was a retired physical therapist who stood out in the group because she brought a sign that was an actual backbone from her work. \u201cBen Cline has no spine,\u201d it said. One day this past summer, Kate Berding asked Macy a question.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy don\u2019t you run?\u201d<\/p>\n

So here she was,\u00a0<\/strong>not two months after she held a book talk at this very same venue, giving a stump speech as a candidate for Congress.<\/p>\n

So what \u201cchanged\u201d since Macy grew up in Urbana? What happened to \u201cthat ladder\u201d that got \u201cyanked\u201d back up? \u201cThe system became rigged against working people,\u201d she told the 50-some folks at the theater. \u201cIt\u2019s built now for pharma companies and price-gouging corporations to rip us off and take advantage of us,\u201d she said. \u201cThe federal support that lifted me out of poverty is now all but gone and got shifted to the top 1 to 5 percent.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople lost faith in politics, they lost faith in government, and it\u2019s rooted in the things that I\u2019ve been writing about for years,\u201d\u00a0she told the local independent outlet Cardinal News\u00a0coinciding with her launch last month. \u201cRemember when Bill Clinton said NAFTA was going to be a win-win?\u201d she said in Clifton Forge. \u201cRemember that they said that it would lift all boats when really it just lifted a lot of yachts?\u201d she said. \u201cClifton Forge and other small towns across Virginia have suffered because of those decisions. And make no mistake. We acted like it was just, like, the natural order of things, the natural order of capitalism. These were decisions made by our elected officials \u2026\u201d Health care, education, affordability \u2014 her developing platform of a \u201ccrisis of opportunity\u201d sounds to me like she wants to do what she can to rebuild some of the rungs on that ladder that she used to get to where she is so that more again might be able to do the same.<\/p>\n

The possibility of a redraw aside, the math of the 6th district is daunting.\u00a0Cline won\u00a063 percent of the vote in 2024, 64 percent of the vote in 2022, 65 percent of the vote in 2020 and 60 percent of the vote in 2018. A Democrat hasn\u2019t won the seat since\u00a0Jim Olin\u00a0was reelected for the last time in 1990.<\/p>\n

And Macy, on account of her profession, has left in what she\u2019s written a smattering of potential political ammunition that could be used against her. \u201cA decade ago,\u201d\u00a0she wrote in\u00a0Raising Lazarus<\/em>, her 2022\u00a0Dopesick<\/em>\u00a0sequel of sorts, \u201cwhen our teenage son was arrested for smoking pot on a Blue Ridge Parkway overlook \u2014 a federal crime because it\u2019s federal property \u2014 I asked if he understood why he was able, ultimately, to walk away with probation and a small fine when many in the courtroom that day left with job-killing felony records. Like most privileged White people, he had no clue. While most of his fellow drug arrestees were represented by overworked public defenders, we had the resources and social capital to find a respected lawyer who pre-negotiated a lesser charge. When our son was arrested again a few years later \u2014 this time for an Adderall pill (unprescribed to him) that police found at a college party he was hosting \u2014 the process repeated itself. \u2026 our son\u2019s case was looked on favorably again by another judge who allowed him to walk away with a second misdemeanor that was also, ultimately, expunged.\u201d In\u00a0Paper Girl<\/em>, she wrote about her own shoplifting as a teenager, her underage drinking citation as a freshman in college and her abortion as a junior, and she wrote, too, about her gay son and her younger nonbinary child.<\/p>\n

Her reportorial disposition might be another challenge on the hustings. In the question-and-answer portion I watched here in what she and her campaign billed as a \u201clistening\u201d session, Macy sometimes answered questions by asking questions of her own, taking notes on a dry-erase board affixed to a wall. It\u2019s a good trait as a reporter. But for a political leader? People interacting with an aspiring member of Congress are going to want some answers.<\/p>\n

Even so, heading into the first midterms of the second Trump turn, when approval ratings say basically everybody hates everybody, when coalitions are shifting and people are well past fed up, when results of late from Tennessee to New Jersey to right here in Virginia suggest within the electorate a boomerang back to the left, who really knows anymore what works or what doesn\u2019t? Macy\u00a0raised in her first 24 hours as a candidate more than $350,000\u00a0\u2014 better than $550,000 so far in the quarter from more than 3,500 donors \u2014 a promising haul in this place and this race. She\u2019s been endorsed by\u00a0Tim Kaine,\u00a0Ro Khanna\u00a0and \u2026\u00a0Batman.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think in any other time period it would be really hard to go from Beth Macy narrative journalist to Beth Macy congresswoman, but we are living in some very strange days,\u201d Andrea Pitzer,\u00a0an author and journalist\u00a0and one of Macy\u2019s best friends, told me. \u201cI think people are angry and people are aching to have somebody who\u2019s willing to listen to them.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBeth is an\u00a0intense<\/em>\u00a0listener,\u201d said Lon Wagner, a former reporter for the\u00a0Virginian-Pilot<\/em>\u00a0who\u2019s another one of her closest pals. \u201cI find myself telling Beth more deeply about something that\u2019s happening in my life than I would almost anybody else,\u201d he told me. \u201cAnd if she can translate that into hearing constituents who haven\u2019t been listened to \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd I think she just embodies the working class and understands the working class in a way that JD Vance \u2014 to my way of thinking, even though he came from the working class, he condescends to it,\u201d\u00a0the Appalachian writer Silas House\u00a0told me. \u201cHe condescended to his own family in\u00a0Hillbilly Elegy<\/em>, he condescended to Appalachian people so terribly in that book \u2014 whereas what Beth Macy has done in her work, especially\u00a0Dopesick<\/em>\u00a0in relation to Appalachia, she hasn\u2019t romanticized or vilified the region. She simply told the truth and revealed the way that the system has been stacked against the people of Appalachia. And she\u2019s used real human stories to do that in other works of hers. She\u2019s used her\u00a0own<\/em>\u00a0story.\u201d<\/p>\n

Could Macy, I asked her here, be something like the JD Vance of the left?<\/p>\n

\u201cExcept for I\u2019m going back and engaging with people and talking to them, and then I\u2019m talking to experts, and then I\u2019m talking to real people on the ground, and I\u2019m going back and forth. He\u2019s just kind of pontificating,\u201d Macy told me.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wasn\u2019t trying to launch a career,\u201d she said. \u201cI was just, like, doing my job.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

CLIFTON FORGE, Virginia \u2014\u00a0Beth Macy stood at a lectern in front of a little more than 50 people<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":2534,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,4,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2533","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-politics","category-us"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2533","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2533"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2533\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2535,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2533\/revisions\/2535"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2534"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2533"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2533"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2533"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}