Review: "The Forgotten Girls" by Monica Potts

 

The Forgotten Girls by Monica Potts
Published April 2023 via Random House
★★★★

In Clinton, Arkansas, where Potts grew up, options were slim. "In high school," she writes, "I feared I only had two paths forward in life. One was to get stuck in Clinton and start having babies as soon as possible. The other was to go away to college. I didn't know many people, let alone daughters of plumbers, who went to college, stayed for four years, and graduated with a degree, except for my teachers. But I imagined college was my safest exit from Clinton" (loc.1358*). Potts and her best friend, Darci, were both poor, but they had the drive to get out, and they had the grades, and they knew that Clinton wouldn't be their forever place—they'd go to college, they'd make something of themselves. And Potts did just that: went to Bryn Mawr, found stability and a career path and the American Dream, if you will.

But this book isn't really about Potts's path. Instead it's an investigation into Darci's life—into how, when Potts was getting degrees and white-collar jobs, Darci ended up spiralling further and further through addiction and prison and homelessness and on it goes. Potts wrote this with Darci's full knowledge, and so she was able to interview both Darci and many people in Darci's life, and to use years of Darci's diaries and sometimes paperwork to fill in gaps.

I thought a lot about Venn diagrams when reading this. At first I thought Darci's circumstances could be illustrated by a fairly simple Venn diagram, with perhaps four circles—poverty, addiction, abuse, maybe lack of education. They can all feed into each other, meaning that more overlaps can make it harder to take even one thing out of the equation...but even if you can take one thing out of the equation, there are still the rest to contend with, and there's no guarantee that things won't get worse rather than better. But to really grasp the extent of Darci's situation, you'd have to expand the diagram: poverty, addiction, abuse, lack of education; then also incarceration (and other run-ins with the law), dysfunctional family life, lack of opportunities, parenting without resources, a societal tendency to view poverty and addiction as moral failings, a simple lack of expectation from others that she would, or could, be more. (We're gonna need a bigger diagram.)

There aren't easy answers here, or an easy conclusion. For the sake of spoilers, I'll avoid details about Darci as the book moves into the present day, but the Clinton of the end of the book is much like the Clinton of the beginning of the book, except poorer and with fewer opportunities and with a much bigger meth problem. But Potts isn't really trying to answer the question of "What will fix this?"—she's saying, instead, "these are some of the many, many ways in which life can be incredibly hard for women in these poor, rural towns." It feels like a cliché to say so, but the book is both compassionate and unflinching.

Readers interested in the experiences of women in the small-town South may also like Hill Women, Kin, and Cottonmouths.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

*I read a review copy, so quotes may not be final.