Heart wrenching look at how drug and alcohol abuse derail so many women's lives in rural areas, and how few escape. Having grown up in a small town, I related to some of the stories in this book. And how two people can be so close, and yet end up wildly diverging in life to live different lives.

A hard, sad read. Thank you Netgalley and Random House for the ARC.

I have read a lot of reviews of this book since it came out. Positive review seem to arise from readers who applaud Monica's ambition and her desire to expand her world, and who grieve with her over her dear friend Denise's failure to develop her own talents and promise. I am in this crowd. I grew up in a rural community in the North and have witnessed first hand the results of a brain drain that pulls ambitious young people out into the wider world, leaving the less curious behind. Once upon a time, these stay-at-homes could look forward to stable lives as farmers, teachers, clerks, secretaries, nurses, and factory workers while keeping their community lively in the ways that rural communities have always done. Rural drug use changed that dynamic, devastating rural life. Denise's wild behavior was no different from the wild behavior of teenage girls in times past, but the consequences, as a result of drugs, was much worse.

The reviews that trash this book seem to be written by at least two different sets of people. The most offensive of these are ones that pretend that Monica Potts has some political agenda or axe to grind and that her book, and the statistics in it, are some kind of propaganda against rural people. Close behind are the loud Christians who seem to think that Denise's life, and lives like hers (drugs, unintended pregnancies, child abandonment, crime, whatever) are perfectly ok because Denise professes faith in Christ and didn't abort. These positions seem pretty weird to me. Why shouldn't we feel pain for Denise's life of addiction and the mental and physical degradation and feel frightened for her children who have been deprived of a mentally stable mother? Why do they blame Monica Potts for her reporting?

We seem to be so polarized that we can't take this book at face value and accord Monica Potts the right to tell a particular story to with a journalist's ability? It's hard to understand.

After I finished reading this book, I bought two hardcovers for my library. One to mark up and one to keep clean.

Not quite a memoir, and not quite a study, Monica Potts' The Forgotten Girls explores the disturbing trend of why lower class white women have such shortened lives and shortened opportunities in the US. I had picked up this book thinking it was a personal memoir -- one of my favorite genres -- but this more distanced approach didn't quite resonate with me. The issue is more with the marketing than the book itself. Interesting, for what it is.

I read this book a few months ago and I've thought back to it more than I expected to. I appreciated the author's vivid descriptions of her hometown - it made it easy to envision a place I've never been. I appreciated her longing to leave, coupled with her guilt for leaving. Overall - this was sad, but relatable story for many women who've seen how childhood friends lives veer differently from the path of their own.

I'm a hardcore memoir reader, and I was very excited to be gifted a copy of this book (thank you to the publisher and Netgalley). I overall enjoyed this memoir - it was a good look into life in a small, rural, poverty-stricken area and how that impacted the author's life and her best friend.

I'm not from Arkansas, but I do come from a very rural, small, poverty-stricken area of Pennsylvania (although I no longer live there). A lot of what the author described resonated with me. I've seen many of the things she described in my hometown and in my family. It's truly sad what is happening in rural America.

What an intimate and powerful memoir. I was so interested to read this book, both because my family is from rural Arkansas and also because I now work with an indigent population.

This memoir follows the author, Monica Potts, and her childhood friend, Darci. They grew up in small town, isolated, ultra=poor Arkansas. The residents are suspicious of the government, science and modern medicine, and any kind of diversity. The southern evangelical faith of the community discourages independent thinking and puts women in a small box.. Monica manages to break free, going to college at Barnard College. She becomes a successful journalist and begins to research a startling trend: the women in her poor community are dying prematurely at unexpectedly high rates.

Potts examines this phenomenon through the lens of her friend, Darci. Once a promising student, her life unraveled with drug, alcohol, and crime. While an interesting and important discussion, Potts does, at times, jump to conclusions and, in her effort to talk about the difficulty of those who stayed behind, can sometimes come across as dismissing any life that wasn't complete success as a failure.

My thanks go to Net Galley and Random House for inviting me to read and review The Forgotten Girls, by Monica Potts. I generally enjoy reading books that focus on the working class, and so I thought this would be a good fit. And it might have been, had it been better written.

In broad contours, it’s a memoir that examines the lives of Potts and her best friend, Darci, both of whom grow up in a tiny, isolated town in the Ozark Mountains. The community is long on religion and red hats, and short on jobs, opportunity, ambition, and encouragement for girls to make something of themselves. Nevertheless, Monica, whose mother has raised her with the expectation that she complete her high school education, go to college, and then live somewhere else where there are more possibilities, has done all of those things, while Darci, who is every bit as talented and has just as much potential, is raised by a dithering mother that lets her do whatever she chooses because she dislikes conflict, and who has no expectation that her daughter will make a better life for herself, since she herself did not.

Okay.

Potts wonders why she made it out of there and Darci didn’t, and yet I’m not seeing the mystery, nor anything that’s all that different from what’s happening all over the country. And indeed, part of the time, Potts discusses this fact, that it is happening in many places that lack resources and that don’t prioritize education. And so, sometimes the story seems to be a sociological study that uses Monica and Darci as examples, and at other times there is so much anguished self-flagellation that I find myself wondering why she thinks the public needs to hear about her friend’s failure to thrive, and whether this isn’t mostly therapeutic writing for the author’s own benefit.

In other words, the book seems like a lengthy treatise in search of a thesis. We wander in and out of both girls’ lives, with a good deal of attention paid to the death of Potts’s sister, but there’s no real direction or clear purpose that I can find.

In the back of my mind, I can hear choruses of other readers asking whether this situation is considered special because it’s about white girls. Nobody makes a fuss when girls in rural areas that are Black or of Latinx heritage fall through the cracks; hell, it’s been happening for more than a hundred years.

Many other reviewers seem to find merit here, but I confess I don’t see much. If you choose to read this one, I suggest getting it free or cheap.

Monica grew up in small town Clinton, Arkansas. She went on to college and a successful career. But later on, she took another look at what went on back there in her hometown for the women and their children. Why was it hard for them to change the way things were? Her best friend she grew up with, Darci, didn’t leave and go to college. She struggled with addiction throughout her life. Why did their lives go in different directions?

Deeply moving portrait of friendship, poverty, womanhood, and America. Does what "Hillbilly Elegy" wishes it could do to tell the story of Appalachia and the vagaries of opportunity.

The Forgotten Girls is part memoir/part study of the poor, rural area of Arkansas. Monica Potts combines personal accounts and data to show how the lives of her friends, neighbors, and family have been shaped by their socioeconomic status, There were many interesting parts of this book, but I was particularly fascinated by her accounts of drug use, the importance of college/education, and generational trauma.

At times memoir, at times biography, at times sociological reporting, "The Forgotten Girls" examines the lives of white women in rural America and how they are left behind by society. Potts tells the story of growing up in Clinton, Arkansas, a blue-collar town where life for women is dominated by men, children, and religion. In this almost dual narrative structure, she illustrates how the life of her childhood best friend, Darci, diverged in key ways from Potts's life -- both were smart girls with big dreams of pursuing a life outside of their small town, away from the cycles their mothers found themselves in. But Potts examines what made it possible for her to leave and find a successful career and her friend Darci to become trapped in the cycle of drug addiction, poverty, and reliance on men.

Potts identifies a number of key social issues that prevent people in the rural areas of the US from succeeding in life. The patriarchal structure of the church; the lack of education in key areas like sex ed; the cycle of poverty; the lack of resources in towns without high enough taxes to fund social programs; the lack of "smart" people who leave Clinton and towns like it to pursue the bigger and better, leaving a "rural brain drain" behind; the ease of access to prescription medication; cycles of trauma that impact mental health; and so much more. Potts attempts to dismantle the idea that it is not just someone's actions that determine if someone will escape the cycle of poverty and attempts to humanize those who suffer from this "cycle of despair". While I don't believe their lives are a close enough parallel to draw this conclusion sufficiently, Potts concludes that a lot of what separated the path Darci's life took and the path her own life took was luck.

I liked moments of this book, and mostly the beginning memoir sections. The book's chapters are short, so they read relatively quickly, but I found the book to be a little slow in spot. I think as some memoirs that attempt the same, the sections of research were a little less effectively integrated and could have been fleshed out more with more sources, or could have been integrated into the narrative more seamlessly.

I think Potts could have gone into more detail about her decision to return to Clinton -- in some spots, especially here, it feels as if she uses her childhood friends and family, as well as her town for her own gain, which felt a little disingenuous. I don't believe that she would uproot her life completely in D.C. to move back to her hometown solely for that reason, and I think it would have been a nice circle back to comments she made about the "rural brain drain", but primarily to the whole narrative arc she had about her mom leaving and coming back.

It is quite clear what the author's religious and political points of view are here, and she is talking about sensitive subjects that many people have their own opinions about -- some people will inevitably give this book lower ratings for that. But I think this book does illustrate some of the fundamental issues in this country that shouldn't be overlooked or ignored.

Potts has written a truly heartbreaking account of the challenges that face young women in rural communities throughout the United States. 'The Forgotten Girls' works as a case study, examining the life of Potts's friend Darci, chronicling the the trajectory of her life. Other girls come in and out of the story, providing additional insight, but this is mostly about Darci. And, how Potts's own life diverged so wildly from the lives of the girls she grew up with. This book hit home for me, having grown up in more rural areas of a Southern state, though not quite so remote and poverty-stricken as the locale Potts describes. I too had a childhood friend whose life took a drastic turn from the one I lived. It's a poignant and resonant tale of girls and women who have been forgotten and left to fend for themselves.

This book broke my heart, honestly…Monica tells the story of her and her childhood friend and the very different paths they ended up taking in life—one being a successful journalist who got out of their poverty-ridden small town, and one who ended up staying in town, in and out of jail, struggling with addiction. This operates as a way to share how rural America fails people, especially women, and talk about the uptick of “deaths of despair’ of women in these communities. It feels like this is also a personal attempt at reckoning with how little control we sometimes have over our own lives, and how painful it can be to watch someone self destruct and not be able to help. The book ends with little closure about the situation between Monica and her friend and I don’t love that, but it’s real life and real life rarely comes wrapped up with a neat little bow. I do hope Monica finds some peace with it all, and that her friend finds her way onto a better path. Will certainly read whatever she writes next.
Thanks to NetGalley for the eARC, provided in exchange for my honest review.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for a copy to read.
Monica Potts sets out to investigate the causes of poverty, specifically the poverty of women from rural areas of America. Overall I enjoyed this book, one of my top genres to read is investigative journalism. Though listed as memoir, my experience reading this was somewhere in the middle. Connecting several systemic issues, she describes a situation that leaves many opportunities for someone to "fall into" and stay in poverty. The memoir side of the book was a bit difficult for me. Comparing her and her best friend's life choices it came across as judgmental-towards her friend as well as the town. The last chapter or two threw me for a loop as well as (*SPOILER*) she moved back to that same town she spent the whole book criticizing.

An interesting and heartstring-pulling memoir, The Forgotten Girls tells the true story of two childhood friends whose paths diverge as they grow in the Ozarks region of the USA. This tale of two intertwined bright young girls who grow to be young women with differing priorities and then women existing in a socially conservative and generally impoverished area provided me with both a peek into two very different lives, while weaving in relevant information about broader regional beliefs, histories, and impacts.

I truly learned quite a bit from this book, particularly about prominent belief systems in a region I know very little about, and histories of societal outlooks I have had a hard time comprehending.

I did, however, have a hard time understanding whether this was a memoir sharing these two specific stories or a social commentary utilizing personal life histories as anecdotal support. This book read as though it wasn’t sure (or perhaps that it was trying to do both), and, to me, the impact of either option was diminished because of its uncertain direction and identity.

While I think the tale told could have been laid-out in a stronger way, it certainly will educate you. If you are someone that likes to understand parts of the world around you and peek into other lives, I would recommend this interesting book.

Thank you so much to Random House Publishing Group and Netgalley for this free review copy.

The Forgotten Girls
A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America
by Monica Potts
Pub Date 30 May 2023
Random House Publishing Group — Random House, Random House
Biographies & Memoirs. |. Nonfiction (Adult)
Random House and Netgalley have provided me with a copy of The Forgotten Girls for review:
The two women became fast friends while growing up gifted and working class in the foothills of the Ozarks.
Even as they navigated the challenges of their tumultuous family lives and declining town — broken marriages, alcohol abuse, and shuttered stores and factories — the girls bonded over their shared love of reading and learning. As they examined the giant map in their middle-school classroom, tracing their fingers over the world that lay ahead, they vowed to escape it as soon as possible. At the end of the day, Monica left Clinton for college and fulfilled her dreams, but Darci, along with many of her friends, could not.
Years later, while working as a journalist covering poverty, Potts discovered what she had always suspected about Arkansas women: their life expectancy had declined precipitously — the sharpest drop in a century. The decline has been attributed to “deaths of despair” such as suicide, alcoholism, and drug overdoses. However, Potts knew their causes were too complex to be identified through 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 and a single mother-was now on the path to becoming a statistic.
This compelling narrative skillfully pinpoints the choices that sent Potts and Darci on such divergent paths, and then widens the lens to explain why these choices are so limited. In The Forgotten Girls, we see an intimate, compassionate portrayal of a population in distress, and we gain a unique insight into the way larger forces shape individual lives, including inheritance, education, religion, and politics.
I give The Forgotten Girls five out of five stars!
Happy Reading!

The Forgotten Girls tells the story of the author and her childhood best friend Darci growing up (and apart) in a working-class poor town. The book jumps between Monica, Darci, and general commentary on the conditions of the town to the point where it feels too unfocused at times. The later chapters where Monica and Darci reconnect as adults felt very transactional and left a bad taste in my mouth.

"The Forgotten Girls" by Monica Potts is a sociological infused memoir about two lives that have gone in very different directions. Potts and her close friend Darci both dream of moving away from small town Arkansas. While Potts succeeds academically in high school and makes it to the east coast for college and builds a life for herself in New York, Darci's downward spiral beginning in high school leads to young motherhood, drug use, and jail time. Potts clearly loves Darci even as their lives diverged. When Potts returns to Arkansas many years after leaving for college, they try to rekindle their friendship, but it is still marked by the vast differences in how their lives have turned out and the rekindled closeness fizzles away. "The Forgotten Girls" highlights the challenges of reaching places with more opportunities from higher education to jobs. As Potts grows up, she witnesses how small towns are shrunken by dwindling job opportunities. This is well-written and recommended.

The Forgotten Girls is a thought provoking dive into life in rural Arkansas. Monica Potts travels back to the small town she escaped after high school to investigate how she avoided the poverty, drug use, early pregnancies, and early deaths that have plagued many of her childhood friends.

Potts focuses her investigation on her best friend Darci, an intelligent and outgoing girl, who becomes just another statistic to an overwhelmed and underfunded system, but her past relationship with Darci pulls at Potts emotions and forces her to ask the question "what do we owe those left behind?"

Potts expertly captures the downward spiral of bad decisions that often result in "deaths of despair"(OD's, suicides, and alcohol related deaths). She evokes in the reader both anger and anguish over a school system complicit in maintaining the status quo, and the consequences when social services are outsourced, mainly to religious organization who can determine who they would like to help instead of state run organizations that are mandated to help everyone in need.

Like every other politically progressive person in the US, I have had it up to here with Empathetic Exploration of Why RWNJs Are the Way They Are, and I had a feeling this was going to turn out to be more of the same. I suppose The Forgotten Girls could be seen that way, except that it's much, much better -- so much better as to be different not only in quality but in kind. I don't remember offhand what other book I compared with Azadeh Moaveni's Guest House for Young Widows, but Forgotten Girls is another I'd put on that shelf: carefully reported, insightful, historically contextualized narrative & discussion of lives and experiences utterly alien to my own.

Monica Potts grew up in Clinton, Arkansas -- just the kind of tiny, isolated, depressed, evangelical town that breeds meth labs and Trumpkins. The tl;dr is that she left: she was academically gifted enough, determined enough, and lucky enough to get a full ride to Bryn Mawr, and she didn't turn into Female J.D. Vance on the way. Meanwhile, Darci, the dearest friend of her childhood, brilliant, funny, and a bit wild, crashed and burned. Bad men, too many drugs of too many kinds, unplanned children, more drugs, lost jobs, worse jobs, more drugs, more crime ...

Potts tells their interlocking and diverging stories and sets Darci's in its context of economic collapse, insularity, toxic religiosity, misogyny, racism, and violence. Darci's story is the story of impoverished rural white women generally. The sufferings of rural white people and their "deaths of despair" tend to get a scornful reaction from progressives, which isn't unreasonable given that most discussions ignore or sideline the suffering of Black people rural and otherwise. The Forgotten Girls stays well clear of that error.

Crucially, Potts makes no excuses for misogyny and racism: the rural economic collapse is real, but you won't find any euphemistic "economic anxiety" here. Also, as she points out, when men feel themselves losing control over the world in general, they double down on the project of controlling women. I'm not sure I've seen that precise connection made before, but it goes some way toward explaining why the red states have gone completely bananacrackers about abortion. Potts doesn't go easy on the racism of white women, either. She quotes Heather McGhee's The Sum of Us -- “Racial hierarchy offered white people a reprieve from the class hierarchy and gave white women an escape valve from gender oppression” -- and points to W.E.B. Du Bois's insights about the "psychological wage" of whiteness.

Potts is very good, too, on the subject of individualism and the twin gospel of self-reliance and reliance on God; missing from that gospel is any sense of obligation to other people, to the community at large. "What almost no one talked about on Facebook, or anywhere else, was our responsibilities to each other."

No solutions here. Should I fault Potts for that? I don't think so; plenty of people have offered policy proposals that, if carried out, might serve as at least partial antitoxins. What Potts does so well here is supply a factually rigorous, intellectually and politically careful discussion of how one group of people, being torn down themselves, wind up trying to tear other people down with them. A brilliant book. I can't recommend it highly enough.

Many thanks to Random House and NetGalley for the ARC.