The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America
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Monica Potts. (2023). The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America. Random House Publishing Group.

Monica Potts. 2023. The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America. Random House Publishing Group.

Monica Potts, The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America. Random House Publishing Group, 2023.

Monica Potts. The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America. Random House Publishing Group, 2023.

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1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Potts, Monica
   • bioText: Monica Potts is a senior politics reporter for the website FiveThirtyEight. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The New Republic, among other publications, and on NPR. She has been a New America fellow and a senior writer with The American Prospect magazine.
   • name: Monica Potts

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The Forgotten Girls

fullDescription

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An acclaimed journalist tries to understand how she escaped her small town in Arkansas while her brilliant friend could not, and, in the process, illuminates the unemployment, drug abuse, sexism, and evangelicalism killing poor, rural white women all over America.
“[A] clear-eyed and tender debut . . . This book is as much the author’s story as a piece of reportage.”—The Wall Street Journal
Growing up gifted and working-class poor in the foothills of the Ozarks, Monica and Darci became fast friends. The girls bonded over a shared love of reading and learning, even as they navigated the challenges of their tumultuous family lives and declining town—broken marriages, alcohol abuse, and shuttered stores and factories. They pored over the giant map in their middle-school classroom, tracing their fingers over the world that awaited them, vowing to escape. In the end, Monica left Clinton for college and fulfilled her dreams, but Darci, along with many in their circle of friends, did not.
Years later, working as a journalist covering poverty, Potts discovered what she already intuitively knew about the women in Arkansas: Their life expectancy had dropped steeply—the sharpest such fall in a century. This decline has been attributed to “deaths of despair”—suicide, alcoholism, and drug overdoses—but Potts knew their causes were too complex to identify in a sociological study. She had grown up with these women, and when she saw Darci again, she found that her childhood friend—addicted to drugs, often homeless, a single mother—was now on track to becoming a statistic.
In this gripping narrative, Potts deftly pinpoints the choices that sent her and Darci on such different paths and then widens the lens to explain why those choices are so limited. The Forgotten Girls is a profound, compassionate look at a population in trouble, and a uniquely personal account of the way larger forces, such as inheritance, education, religion, and politics, shape individual lives.

reviews

1. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     November 1, 2022
     

     Growing up in an impoverished working-class community in the foothills of the Arkansas Ozarks, Potts and best friend Darci dreamed of escape. In the end, only Potts left, returning as a journalist to investigate the steep drop in life expectancy among Arkansas women (and the general collapse of living standards in the rural South). Reconnecting with her old friend, a jobless single mother dependent on meth and prescription drugs, she considers how their lives could have turned out so differently.

     Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

2. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     January 30, 2023
     FiveThirtyEight reporter Potts debuts with a compassionate look at the rapid decline in life expectancy among “the least educated white Americans.” In 2015, Potts began returning to her Ozark hometown of Clinton, Ark., to investigate this trend and reconnected with her childhood best friend, Darci Brawner, a single mother of two who had fallen into drug addiction. In the book’s first section, “Causes,” Potts recounts her teenage years with the free-spirited, caring, and intelligent Darci, and documents how Darci’s partying and sexual experimentation drove a wedge between them. By the time Potts gave her high school’s valedictory address, Darci had gone through a miscarriage, tried crystal meth, and missed so many days of school that she couldn’t graduate. The second half of the narrative, “Effects,” is a harrowing chronicle of Darci’s downward spiral after high school and Potts’s fraught attempts to help her after they reconnected. Throughout, Potts draws on extensive interviews with friends and family to reveal how poverty, generational trauma, substance abuse, and the suffocating righteousness of the evangelical church limit women’s options in places like Clinton. It’s a potent study of what ails the depressed pockets of rural America. Agent: Elyse Cheney, Cheney Agency.

3. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     March 15, 2023
     From her unique perspective, FiveThirtyEight reporter Potts speculates about causes of the higher mortality rates found in rural southern women as compared to those raised in the rest of the country. Her approach is a longitudinal case study comparing her own story to that of a childhood friend who remained tethered to the declining Arkansas community Potts left. The author credits parental support and self-discipline for her escape from a cycle of despair that traps many women from impoverished areas. Offering intimate details of her own experience, Potts describes how small communities often fail their young people. In describing her friend's situation, she identifies factors contributing to the rampant abuse, addiction, and injustices she witnessed while growing up. Although she cites various studies, Potts relies heavily on personal and anecdotal evidence to support her ideas and provide context. As a journalist, she proposes that her friend's struggles reflect a trend of widespread societal decay. The picture Potts paints is a bleak one, but her memoir serves as a sincere attempt to elicit compassion for those she left behind.

     COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

4. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from February 15, 2023
     A journalist examines the forces that allowed her to escape the limitations of a rural upbringing but caused a beloved friend to fall into poverty and despair. Driven to understand why poor, uneducated White women were dying at higher rates than ever before, Potts, a senior politics reporter for FiveThirtyEight, went back to her Ozark hometown to live and work. Her professional interest in the subject belied a more personal reason for her return. Until she left to attend Bryn Mawr, Potts had spent her childhood and adolescence growing up among the very women she was now studying. Darci, a smart girl with numerous prospects, had been her best friend. However, Darci also grew up with a mother who did not set behavioral boundaries and often relied on "God's plan" to see her through difficulties, including her volatile marriage to Darci's father. By contrast, the author had far stricter and more grounded parents. The Potts family centered their lives on their daughters' success, and they moved out of town to keep them away from the wayward boys, drugs, and alcohol that could prevent them from getting an education. A set of fortuitous accidents offered Potts the opportunity to attend a Barnard pre-college summer program, which opened doors that allowed her to attend an elite college far from her hometown. In the meantime, pregnancy and a descent into drugs and alcohol led Darci to drop out, after which she began a heartbreaking slide into poverty, mental illness, violent relationships, and repeated incarceration. Potts pointedly examines the complicated relationship between two childhood friends who experienced radically different life outcomes, and she creates a compelling sociological and cultural portrait that illuminates the silent hopelessness destroying not just her own hometown, but rural communities across America. A hauntingly cleareyed and poignant memoir with strong, illustrative reportage.

     COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An acclaimed journalist tries to understand how she escaped her small town in Arkansas while her brilliant friend could not, and, in the process, illuminates the unemployment, drug abuse, sexism, and evangelicalism killing poor, rural white women all over America.
“[A] clear-eyed and tender debut . . . This book is as much the author’s story as a piece of reportage.”—The Wall Street Journal
Growing up gifted and working-class poor in the foothills of the Ozarks, Monica and Darci became fast friends. The girls bonded over a shared love of reading and learning, even as they navigated the challenges of their tumultuous family lives and declining town—broken marriages, alcohol abuse, and shuttered stores and factories. They pored over the giant map in their middle-school classroom, tracing their fingers over the world that awaited them, vowing to escape. In the end, Monica left...

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A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America

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   • description: Political Science / Public Policy / Social Policy
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