My first book, Factory Man, grew out of what happened when all the jobs went away-this happened in a lot of small towns, including my own.
So I’m always compelled by the story of the person who wasn’t handed everything, especially when they are victims of these greed-controlled systems, like globalization. I grew up really poor I’m the first person in my family to go to college. I grew up in a small town in Ohio-Urbana. I think writing about outsiders and underdogs comes from my own experience of having been one. You’ve spent many years writing about Americans who are struggling.
If she’d worked at a big-city paper instead of the Roanoke Times, she thinks the stories in her books probably wouldn’t have been told. When asked whether she has thought of leaving Roanoke, she said no. While we talked, she roamed her neighborhood with her dog, Mavis. We spoke with Macy by phone-about the opioid crisis but also about her precarious upbringing in small-town Ohio, her efforts to tell underdog stories, and her alarm at the decline of the news business, which she watched firsthand as a reporter for the Roanoke Times from 1989 to 2014. Many will likely stay the course-attempting to incarcerate the problem away-but Raising Lazarus provides an alternative road map for more compassionate and effective ways to use those funds. The book comes at a crucial moment: This year, funds from blockbuster opioid-related legal settlements are beginning to flow to local governments, which will have to decide how to use the money. Macy’s new book, Raising Lazarus, tackles the issue of how to treat the epidemic, making a passionate case for seeing addiction not as a moral weakness or a criminal problem but as an illness that’s treatable with medications like methadone and buprenorphine. Roanoke-based journalist Beth Macy is one of the best-known chroniclers of America’s opioid epidemic-first through her 2018 book, Dopesick, then with its adaptation into a Hulu TV series last fall.
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