![]() I didn’t see her again at the residency she likely spent nearly every waking hour writing and editing her most recent book, Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America’s Overdose Crisis. I imagined that even without a deadline, Macy would be working-she had that kind of dogged energy, a commitment to telling the story she needed to tell and finding the right words. She wanted to spend more time hanging out, she said, but she had that deadline. After dinner, she swiftly headed back to her studio. Macy was warm and quick-witted, and sparked with the restless energy of a curious mind. Macy was easygoing and a nimble conversationalist-she drank a beer and talked about writing and researching her new book, the one she was on deadline for and which she described as more hopeful than Dopesick, but still dark. ![]() The next evening, the setting sun turning the sky shades of silver and pink, I sat at Macy’s table with several other writers and artists, and we talked about politics, COVID, and our creative work. Macy is also the author of Truevine, which tells the story of a racially motivated kidnapping in nineteenth-century Virginia. The TV series captures the realities of Appalachia and opioid addiction with complexity and compassion, while also dramatizing the Sackler family’s role in flooding rural America with Ox圜ontin. The Hulu TV adaptation of Dopesick, for which Macy was an executive producer and co-writer, premiered in 2021 and stars Michael Keaton and Rosario Dawson. She was a staff writer for the Roanoke Times for twenty-five years, reporting on social issues and marginalized communities that led to writing 2014’s Factory Man, on economic dislocations caused by globalization, and the New York Times bestseller Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America, from 2018, on the opioid crisis. Macy has been working on deadline for over thirty years. Back at my studio, I messaged Macy on Facebook, and she immediately wrote back that she’d come to dinner tomorrow. She’s on a deadline.” An admirer of Macy’s investigative journalism on the opioid crisis, I was eager to meet her. Maybe she’d left early? A painter told me, “Oh, I don’t think she comes to dinner much. At least, her name was on the list of residents: I hadn’t seen any sign of her-not at dinner or lunch, or walking the grounds. Last summer Beth Macy and I overlapped by a few days at the artist residency the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
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