The Forgotten Girls A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America

Monica Potts

eBook - 2023

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 JournalGrowing 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 an...d 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... more