Summary of The Forgotten Girls By Monica Potts: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America

By Willie M. Joseph

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Summary of The Forgotten Girls By Monica Potts: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America

 

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Monica Potts and her best friend, Darci, were both determined to make something of themselves. Growing up in the foothills of the Ozarks, they bonded over a shared love of reading and learning. Years later, Potts discovered that their life expectancy had dropped steeply due to "deaths of despair" such as suicide, alcoholism, and drug overdoses. The Forgotten Girls is a profound, compassionate look at a population in trouble, and a uniquely personal account of the way larger forces shape individual lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Willie M. Joseph
• Release date: May 30, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223928348

Willie M. Joseph

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Prologue

The narrator was six when their parents were looking for a new house to rent in Clinton, Arkansas. Unfortunately, none of the places they looked at were affordable or in livable condition. On Christmas Eve 2015, the narrator was driving home from the airport when they saw the sparsely populated landscape of Clinton and felt homesickness. They had reconnected with their childhood best friend, Darci Brawner, and had been back in Clinton a number of times since then. On Christmas Eve, the narrator set out to pick her up on Bee Branch Mountain, following directions scribbled in a reporter’s notebook.

Inside the trailer was gloomy, with dark, fake-wood-paneled walls and too few windows curtained with dark sheets. Darci and James had met only weeks before and she had no income and had been homeless before staying at James' place. They had a kitchen with cabinets of particleboard and laminate, a living room with a couch and TV, and a Great Dane-size mutt. Darci emerged from the only bedroom with  The most important details in this text are that white women who did not graduate from high school are dying five years younger than their male counterparts, and that the decline in life expectancy among white Americans began before the political upheaval of Donald Trump's election and the devastation of Covid-19 in 2020. Black Americans in general have higher rates of mortality than whites at every age, as a result of systemic racism, prejudice, and uneven medical care.

In 2015 Anne Case and Angus Deaton found that the drop in life expectancy was largely attributable to increases in drug overdoses, suicides, and complications from alcoholism. In 2018 Paul Novosad and Charlie Rafkin found that deaths from all causes, not just deaths of despair, were rising among the least educated whites. This group seemed to be suffering from a range of disadvantages, and the complexity of the issues made it difficult for researchers to identify a specific cause. The Covid-19 pandemic has had a long-term impact on the population of rural white women in the United States. Despite the availability of free vaccines, the death rates for middle-aged, white Americans in rural areas rose due to persistent vaccine hesitancy and the rise of fentanyl, a more deadly synthetic opioid.

To answer the questions of why less educated, rural white women were dying and what was killing them, the author looked into the circumstances, accidents, and personal choices that fill and shape our lives. The narrator and Darci have been together for years, but the narrator's smiles fade and they hold each other less close. The narrator's investigation has taken them through layers of grief and the pain of watching a loved one fall apart. They plan to remember their childhood and retrace the steps that had taken them apart to find the answers to their questions.

Part I

Place

The narrator's father, Billy, was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2004 and given less than two years to live. Two years later, his cancer came back suddenly and fiercely, leading to a two-week hospital stay. The narrator was working at The New York Times as a news assistant and had vacation days that they needed to use before the end of the year. When Billy was released from the hospital, he was so weak that his mother and her friend had to help him up the stairs. The narrator's father was in the Veterans Administration hospital in Little Rock, receiving treatment.

He couldn't talk to them, but they saw in his eyes that he was trying to communicate something. The narrator's father, a heavy smoker and drinker, died young. Courtney and the narrator stayed as long as they could, but then had to return to their respective cities. Their mother, Momma, was afraid they would quit their jobs and rush home. She hid the struggles of people in Clinton from the narrator, fearing they would lose the opportunities that leaving had afforded them.

The narrator's mother had been out of the country for a few years, and her fear was so deep and irrational that she thought they would ruin it for them. The Ozark Plateau, which straddles the northern half of Arkansas and the southern half of Missouri, is carved into hills and modest mountains by rivers and creeks. The town of Clinton lies in a wide valley where two big creeks come together in a Y. White settlement forced Native Americans away from the territory, while European immigrants trickled in slowly and tried to force the hills to become farmland. Van Buren County covers 724 square miles, but today the city has almost five hundred times as many people, with English, Scottish, and Irish names living in the river valleys.

The interplay of mountain and water, and the problems it could cause, made it difficult for white settlers to succeed in rural America. John Wesley Powell warned that the lands west of the Mississippi were unsuitable for farming, but the federal government still promoted the idea of the rugged individual farmer-settler. Today, rural counties in the middle of the country are older, whiter, less educated, and more conservative than the nation as a whole. Slaves made up just under 4% of