All tragedies have heroes. Obvious heroes, complicated heroes, reluctant heroes: The genre demands them. When grief does not belong to us, we sometimes struggle to see it clearly. A hero lets us empathize safely; we can even believe that our troubles are not as individually peculiar as they sometimes feel to us. Reporting can have the same virtues, and that is the case with Dopesick, author Beth Macy's examination of the opioid crisis in southwest Virginia.
Dopesick is nonfiction, but it unfolds like a tragedy, in a place that receives little national attention outside of election years. Mostly Appalachian and often poor, southwest Virginia is a region Macy knows well. She's based in Roanoke and formerly reported for The Roanoke Times; Dopesick is not, in other words, the work of a distant observer.
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