The forgotten girls A memoir of friendship and lost promise in rural America

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.

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. (Apr.)

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 (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Chapter 1 Place When I left Clinton for college at eighteen, I thought I'd never come back. My mom, Kathy, had always lived in terror that her daughters would get stuck in Clinton, so for most of my life, I knew I would leave and stay gone. Fear propelled me outward, dominating my relationship to my hometown as I grew up. When I was twenty-four, in 2004, my dad, Billy, was diagnosed with lung cancer. He was given less than two years to live, but he responded well to treatment. Two years later, in the summer of 2006, the cancer had gotten so small that doctors couldn't detect it on scans. That was what my sister Courtney and I were told. Courtney was living in Denver, and I was in New York. Then in the fall of 2006, his cancer came back suddenly and fiercely, leading to a two-week hospital stay. My mom didn't tell us. My dad was released from the hospital, but he was so weak that my mom and her friend had to help him up the stairs. They still didn't tell Courtney or me how ill he'd become. I was working at The New York Times as a news assistant and had vacation days that I needed to use before the end of the year, so I could have gone home, and if I had, I would have been with them during his last week. Instead, I stayed in New York, having dinners and drinks with friends, spending long days at museums, relaxing. I think about that week a lot, imagining my dad stumbling into his bedroom for the last time. A few days after he came home from the hospital, Daddy was watching the TV show Lost when he called downstairs to my mom and said something weird: "Doesn't that actress look like her grandfather?" Momma rushed upstairs and found him seizing. He was rushed to the hospital again, for what proved to be the last time. Finally, Momma called us. By the time Courtney and I flew home, our father was in the Veterans Administration hospital in Little Rock, receiving treatment. Tumors covered his brain, and the doctors said they could do nothing but make him comfortable in his last days. He couldn't talk to us, just made a whispery whir whir whir sound. We saw in his eyes, though, that he was trying to communicate something. We struggled to decipher it. Was he trying to tell Momma to take care of his dog, Puppy? we asked. He nodded and sighed with the most relieved look I've ever seen. We hugged him, and he combed his fingers through our hair, as he'd done when we were little. He was fifty-five. We'd always known that Daddy, a heavy smoker and drinker, would die young. He'd known it too. Courtney and I stayed as long as we could but then had to return to our respective cities. He died soon afterward, and we flew back to bury him. The last time I'd been inside the town's United Methodist church, I'd attended someone else's funeral. Mourning him in the same place now felt like closing a grim, traumatic loop. I'm not sure I've ever forgiven Momma for not telling us before it was too late. "Your daddy didn't want you girls to know," she said during our first fight about it. "We were afraid you'd quit your jobs and rush home." For years afterward, whenever someone else died, or when Puppy died--which she told me about very casually in a text message--I'd call her up and yell at her, angry and accusatory. I'd ask her again what I'd asked her then--"Why on earth would we have quit our jobs and come back?"--and she'd just say she didn't know. But her fear was so deep and irrational that she thought we would lose the opportunities that leaving had afforded us simply by coming home. She couldn't imagine a world in which we had stable lives while also staying connected to our family. She had actually gotten out once. After high school, she'd lived for a few struggling years in and around Chicago. She had moved back after a personal trauma that she told us about only when we were grown. So our being able to live elsewhere felt momentous to her. It had taken so much effort on her part to ensure that we left, and then she worried that she would ruin it for us, that some family trauma would force us to return, as she had had to return. So she hid the struggles of people in Clinton from us. She was proud that Courtney and I didn't live in Clinton, but her pride came at a cost: I'd missed that last week with my dad, and I often felt a little unmoored and displaced, as if I had no home at all. Excerpted from The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America by Monica Potts All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.