The Forgotten Girls
This is a book concerned with childhood friendship and the flipside of the American Dream. Anyone can achieve it but the odds are stacked against many of them. The author, Monica Potts, a journalist, returned to her home town of Clinton in Arkansas close to the Ozarks to find out what happened to her childhood best friend, Darci. They were both bright, lively and keen to escape Clinton. But only one of them did. What happened to Darci and to some of their classmates?
As Monica says, ‘the flip side of American independence is a tendency to abandon people to their fate.’ She moves back to the town she escaped from and begins to interview classmates and Darci. The latter flits through the narrative in a messy, chaotic life as she manages briefly to get off drugs, ends up back on them, goes into another relationship, finds a job and then loses it. Monica wonders if Darci’s ‘messy life (was a)….fear of being too settled, too trapped.’ Darci did not graduate from high school and ended up in bad relationships with her children being brought up by their maternal grandmother. In some cases in the book, the children repeat the mistakes of their parents. However, we hear very little of Monica’s life after leaving Clinton and I would have liked to have read more about it.
She recalls her childhood and adolescence in Clinton which still is a conservative town with the local churches and religion having a huge influence and exerting social control by banning books. This is the 1980’s/1990’s and it’s a time of purity rings and going along with God’s plan for you. It’s preordained so don’t try to change it. In one of the most poignant scenes in the book after Monica’s younger sister Ashley tragically dies in a car crash, mourners try to console her by saying that her death was pre-ordained by God. It’s this kind of thinking, in my opinion, that keeps people trapped in their situation as they feel they can’t escape and there is no choice.
Like most small towns, Clinton doesn’t like outsiders either. Monica and Darci parade in the latest fashions from the grunge era to the derision of their classmates. Ashley is diagnosed with Tourette’s syndrome and has a hard time. And yet after her death people remembers her differently with real affection as if she had changed in some way. There is the double standard about girls sleeping around and teenage pregnancies. With the latter, there is also the status and value of motherhood once the baby is born.
Clinton has the same problems as some UK rural communities: lack of employment as by the end of the book most local employers have left the town. Drugs such as fentanyl take over from Oxycontin and heroin as it’s cheaper and easier to obtain.
Monica’s mother wanted her to escape from Clinton and did not want her daughters to be trapped in the town’s tight constricts. But for Monica, she finds out by chance that she is eligible for financial aid to go to college. Would this information have made a difference to Darci and other classmates? Monica sees that high school is divided into those who are going to college and those who aren’t. She will have to make her own way.
It’s Darci who contacts Monica via Facebook and at the end of the book there is a genuine acknowledgement of their friendship as they were growing up. I did the same with my oldest childhood friend as I wondered what had happened to her.
The book is interspersed with some truly shocking statistics such as that poor white rural women are dying 5 years earlier than their counterparts a generation ago. It’s a ‘rapid drop in life expectancy and the most sustained in a generation’. These deaths have been attributed to drug overdoses, suicides and alcoholism and described as ‘deaths of despair.’ This is disturbing reading as are other statistics throughout the book but there are no easy solutions. There are many reasons why people don’t leave their rural communities and these are touched on in the book. They include supporting their families and being tied to the land.
The Forgotten Girls is not a book with easy answers. At times it’s auto biographical, at other times it’s a social commentary, and also a discussion of how people slip through the net and have their lives go in a different direction. Low expectations, especially for girls, the need to earn money, not moving or studying far from home, ill fated relationships and poverty all combine to keep people in the same place. Near the end, Darci’s mother, Virginia, is convicted of embezzling £173,000 from her employer to ‘pay the bills.’
My copy had some proof reading errors and in one place made the paragraph unreadable.
Sometimes this is not an easy book to read and I wouldn’t say that I enjoyed it but as an exploration of another side of the American Dream and of a childhood friendship it was fascinating and, at times, heartbreaking reading.
My thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for an ARC.

In his classic historical text The Making of the English Working Class (1963), EP Thompson famously argued that the rise of Methodism from the eighteenth century onwards represented a 'chiliasm of despair': it allowed working-class people to accept their subordination to industrial capitalism by encouraging them to focus on the promised life beyond death. Historians have since challenged Thompson's interpretation, pointing out that Methodism fostered vibrant community life and could actually be linked to political radicalism, not passive acceptance of one's lot. However, I couldn't help thinking of the 'chiliasm of despair' when I read the opening of Monica Potts's The Forgotten Girls, which seeks to understand why life expectancy declined so rapidly for the least educated white Americans, especially white women, between 2014 and 2017. As Potts tells us, the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton attribute these early deaths to drug overdoses, suicides and alcoholism. They call them 'deaths of despair'.

Like Thompson, Potts argues that despair is closely linked to evangelical religion. 'In some ways, Christians have been waiting two thousand years for the world to end,' she says, writing of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in her rural Arkansas hometown of Clinton, although the biggest religious group there were the Southern Baptists, another evangelical denomination. 'Poor white people with the least education, who live in areas with high concentrations of evangelical Protestants, are the ones who are dying young', Potts argues. But are apocalyptic beliefs cause or consequence of these difficult lives? Potts comes down, mostly, on the side of cause: 'People went to churches that preached heaven as the ultimate reward... earth was just a temporary place... If that's the case, why struggle to make the world better? Better to concentrate on one's faith... the responsibility to escape into heaven belongs to each individual person.' Potts blames evangelical Christianity for structural misogyny, a lack of community, and a focus on blaming the individual rather than thinking about wider social problems.

Like the 'chiliasm of despair' chapter in The Making of the English Working Class, this kind of explanation is seductive, especially if you're not religious or belong to a very different kind of faith. But are things really this simple? Potts suggests she wants to complicate these sociological narratives by telling the story of two girls: herself, and her best friend Darci. Both grew up in Clinton in the 1980s and 1990s, and came from very similar socio-economic backgrounds, but they ended up taking very different paths. Potts ended up getting her degree from Bryn Mawr and is now a senior politics reporter at FiveThirtyEight; Darci lost custody of her two children to her mother and cycled through a series of spells in prison because of her drug addictions. Both girls were desperate to get out of Clinton as teenagers, but while Potts has lived in DC and New York, Darci never moved more than fifteen minutes from the town.

For me, the problem is that Darci's story doesn't really change the narrative that Potts presents us with at the very start of this book. Often it seems that she's just using Darci as an example of the wider trends she's observed rather than really embracing her complexity as a human being. While I wouldn't deny the harmful impact of this kind of evangelical Christianity alongside the generational poverty experienced by rural Americans, The Forgotten Girls sometimes seems to be preaching that there's only one right way to live: get your high school diploma, go to college, get out, and make sure you don't have kids until your thirties. Potts touches on the reasons that people don't want to leave their rural communities - the need to support their families, the ties of land, the value and status that women receive when they become mothers early - but she ultimately says little about this. There's a sense that we just need to work out how to keep girls like Darci in education, and everything will be OK. Having gone to a school where many of my classmates rejected formal education for very sensible reasons - and where some of them ended up becoming teenage mothers - I don't think it's that easy.

The missing story in The Forgotten Girls is not only Darci's but Monica's. Potts tells us a bit about her life when she was still a teenager in Clinton, but once she lives, she vanishes from the book, becoming the observing sociologist rather than the subject. This not only feels unfair on Darci but shortchanges the reader. We need to know how Monica has lived her life, as well. Why does she choose to return to live in Clinton in the end? What draws her back? Instead, The Forgotten Girls tells us an all-too-familiar story about rural poverty, and never really plumbs the depths of despair.

The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America is an ambitious book. Author Monica Potts revisits the years she spent growing up in rural Arkansas, and ponders why she was able to move away and build a successful life while her childhood best friend, Darci, who stayed behind, fell into a hole of poverty, unemployment, addiction and mental health struggles. From here Potts sets out to extrapolate an explanation as to why white women from poor, rural towns in the south are more likely to succumb to so-called deaths of despair - caused by suicide, drug addiction and alcoholism. Part memoir, part social commentary, and part history, The Forgotten Girls is a fascinating book which expertly weaves the author's own experiences and those of her friends and neighbours, with meticulous research to create a compelling, heartbreaking narrative.

“For this world is not our permanent home; we are looking forward to a home yet to come,” reads Hebrews 13:14. The verse, which the author references in the text, refers to the Christian belief that life on Earth is merely a stop-gap on the way to heaven, but it works nicely as an allegory for the ultimate question of The Forgotten Girls. The author tells how she always felt that, for her, settling down in her poor, rural southern hometown was not an option she could countenance. She wanted to graduate high school, go to college out of state and have a big life in a far-off city. But for so many of her contemporaries, the assumption was that they would marry young, with probably no more than a high school education, if that, raise their children, go to church, and work the same jobs their parents had. For far too many women in towns like Clinton, Arkansas, this choice (and Potts argues convincingly that it cannot really be considered a choice) leads to a life of misery, poverty, addiction and early death. This book explores the myriad factors that might explain why this is the default for so many, those whom - unlike Monica Potts - always knew that they would make their permanent home where they were born, and for whom looking forward to a home yet to come was just a fanciful, unrealised dream - if it even occurred to them at all.

Potts demands to know why women in particular are dying younger than they had been a generation before, and why people in towns like Clinton are more vulnerable to drug addiction, alcoholism and mental health problems. Her exploration of the factors which might account for this tragic trend is comprehensive and far-reaching: the boundaries parents are or are not willing to enforcement, and the aspirations they have, or do not have, for their daughters, and the role transgenerational trauma plays in all of this; the church, purity culture and the expectation, enforced in all areas of society, that women should desire nothing more than a life of submission and servitude; generational poverty dating back to pioneer times, limited employment opportunities; ill-fated relationships driven by the need for money, shelter, security, or the need to preserve reputation.

The Forgotten Girls is the most interesting non-fiction book I've read in a long time, and has inspired me to read more widely on this subject - I found myself noting down several of the books referenced. I look forward to reading more by this author.

Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin Press UK for the opportunity to read and review an ARC of this book.

Subtitled ‘An American Story’, The Forgotten Girls describes the parallel lives of author Monica Potts and her childhood best friend Darci, in Clinton, a small town in Arkansas increasingly damaged by unemployment, drugs and general neglect from the centre.

Potts tells their stories with a certain detachment and intersperses that narrative with facts, analysis and quotations from academic studies about poverty and under-achievement in rural America. Obviously, she’s a Clinton insider and, as a UK reader, she really explained the nuances of organised religion in the States so that I truly understood them for the first time.

In particular, she highlights the cyclical nature of the struggle, especially among women and across the generations. She doesn’t necessarily offer any answers, but there are clear ways in which the two girls’ upbringings differed and I felt I was able to draw some conclusions about what would or could have made a difference for Darci.

My only issue is that the title makes it sound like a mediocre crime novel, which does the book a great disservice. Otherwise, it seems clearsighted, honest and deeply compassionate for a whole community. This could be a dry book. It isn’t. In fact, it’s fascinating, surprisingly compulsive and at times very moving.

The premise of the book is brilliant and strangely intriguing and the first part of it is excellently written, but the author then uses a lot statistics which I don't think were needed, they did not support the story, they detracted from it.

I liked this book, I found it very interesting and intriguing as Potts writes about how different her life and that of her childhood best friend Darci's given that they both were brought up in the same small town of Clinton. The only difference being that Potts got out of the town whereas Darci didn't. We see how successful Potts is and we see how Darci is a drug user, with kids and with a string of men and who is often in trouble with the police She uses lots of statistics and sometimes I found it alot to take it. Overall I did like this book and would recommend.

Once upon a time, in the foothills of the Ozarks, there lived two girls, Monica and Darci. They quickly became best friends, in spite of the fact that their personalities were quite different. There were similarities. Both were gifted, did well academically, and were encouraged in school. Both wanted to leave Clinton, Arkansas, dreaming dreams and making schoolgirl plans to go to college far away after they graduated from high school. But life isn't a fairytale and as the 1990s progressed, they started to grow apart. Their lives diverged. One continued to focus on the dream of leaving and the other started to spiral into addiction, dysfunctional and dangerous behaviour, and self-harm, tying her ever more tightly to the town she used to want to leave. They lost touch for several years until one day, Darci tracked Monica down on social media and got in touch.

By this time, Monica was a journalist. She knew that there are rural areas all around the country with the same problems and societal pressures at work, wreaking havoc with the lives of their inhabitants. She wanted to know more about these pressures and why some people escape (as her mother saw it) and some end up staying, often simply because they don't see any other possibility. She and Darci were a couple of examples and she decided to use their stories to tell a larger tale.

Darci gave Monica permission to read her diaries. Monica interviewed many people in the town and essentially began a participant observation project. She dug through data. This powerful and important book is the result--part memoir, part sociology, part journalism. It's extremely well done, quite thought-provoking, and highly readable. I did not want to put it down. When I had to, I was thinking about it and eagerly looking forward to picking it up again. Potts does a fine job of using her story and Darci's as the structure on which the book is built while skillfully broadening the narrative lens so we can see how their lives fit into the bigger picture. She inserts the data in a way that does not interrupt the flow of the story. Because the story is ongoing there is no neat and tidy ending. We leave these two women at a recent moment in their lives, hoping that eventually, a happy (or at least happy-ish) ending will come.

I enthusiastically recommend this book. Definitely 5 stars.

A fascinating look into paths taken – intentionally or otherwise – Potts explores the dramatically different circumstances of her own life to that of her best childhood friend, Darci. How did she escape the entrenched bias and hardship of her working-class background growing up in the foothills of the Ozarks when Darci did not? Potts explores their differing fates, along with those of the other 'forgotten girls' of one of the US's poorest regions, which not-so-coincidentally is notorious for being one of the worst hit by the opioid crisis that has devastated so many American lives.

Author Monica Potts grew up in the small town of Clinton, Arkansas, longing to escape and make something of her life beyond the religious, conservative future she seemed set to follow. As a young woman Potts was close friends with another young woman from her hometown, Darci, and their lives seemed set to follow a similar trajectory of heading to university and moving on and away from the fate which befell many of their peers: being a teenage mum (and housewife), married to a man they didn't love and stuck in a cycle of depression, addiction, abusive relationships and poverty. But Darci did end up staying in their hometown, and as an adult Potts returns to examine why they ended up following such different paths in life and why women in poorer rural areas face unique challenges in escaping this cycle.

I found this to be an incredibly engaging and thought-provoking read, and it is one I would highly recommend.

The first half is fascinating as Monica recalls her childhood and adolescence with her best friend Darci, growing up in a small-town in Arkansas where everything is limited: money, jobs, ambition. Generation seems to follow generation where lives are blighted by low educational achievements, poverty, abuse, pregnancy, early marriage, domestic violence, alcoholism, drug abuse and adherence to a religious belief that says all this is god's intention so don't bother trying to change it.

Potts' question is how did she manage to stick to their joint goal of leaving while Darci got dragged under - and there are no easy answers. Both girls were bright and clever, getting top grades through school but from there they lives increasingly diverged.

The second half starts to lose its way as Potts increasingly throws in research to prove her points - points that don't really need proving anyway and which are well publicised.

What is clear is how systemic the problems are: low employment prospects, teenage pregnancy because the religious cultural stranglehold forbids sex education and promotes early marriage, misogynistic mindsets that mean girls are raised to have few expectations other than to be wives and mothers, education counselors in schools who don't seem to be aware of scholarships and financial aid for university (can this be right?) thus locking people into a poverty loop...

The religious conservatism seems especially pernicious as it absolves communities of all hope and desire for change - it's striking that the town of Clinton didn't believe in covid vaccinations, voted overwhelmingly for Trump, and feared peaceful BLM protests more than covid.

A suffocating story for hopelessness lit only by the long friendship between two girls, one of whom seems to be drowning while the other can do little to save her.