When Monica Potts and Darcy were kids, they were best friends with a big future. Ambitious and smart, they planned to leave Clinton, their poor rural Arkansas town in the Ozark Mountains, to start a new life elsewhere. Years later, now a New York-based journalist, Potts reconnected with her old friend and was stunned. Darcy, who gave her permission to write this book, did not go to college as planned. She was sometimes homeless, raised two children alone, and became addicted to methamphetamine and prescription drugs. How, Potts asked, had her life been so different?
Forgotten girls simultaneously explores the development of friendships—how they can wax, wane, and flare up again after years in the wilderness—and an exploration of how and why the life expectancy of poor white women in America is shrinking. Studies have called these deaths “desperate” and linked them to suicide and addiction. But Potts, who grew up in the rural South, knew that the reasons why one person would embark on this path and another would not were infinitely more complex than research could understand.
Clinton has always been poor, not only financially, but also because the horizons of her citizens are very narrow. Smart kids should be happy when they are encouraged to go to college. The dominance of evangelical Christianity in small towns explains a lot and encourages people not to look for solutions, but to trust God’s plan, even when it comes to teen pregnancy or deaths from dangerous driving.
Potts suggests that the people of the Ozarks were doomed from the start, as long ago the government encouraged white settlers to cultivate inferior land west of the Mississippi “in which they insisted that every American could succeed by simple effort.” . Today, their descendants remain poor, partly because their land is still so little worth, but they are stubbornly attached to it. Potts learns that her grandfather has returned from prosperous California with his fiancee to buy his ancestors’ cheap, worthless land. Factories are closing, jobs are scarce, drugs are plentiful. Potts later described the economic collapse in many regions, saying, “It’s an American disease. Instead of using the vast wealth and resources of our society to lift everyone up, we allow more and more people to descend to our country.”
But both Darcy and Potts grew up in Clinton under the same influences, with poverty and puritanism, divorce and tragedy permeating their childhoods. So why such different results? Co-parents: Potts had a mother who was frustrated with her own imprisonment and insisted that her girls come out. Darcy’s mother, on the other hand, failed to discipline her children and seems, Potts thinks, to have been too preoccupied with her romantic frustrations to properly raise them when Darcy’s celebration got out of hand. I wonder if Potts could do something himself? Maybe less judgment on Darcy’s part, more contact? Darcy also failed many times with a system that failed to show young people what options were available (Potts accidentally found a life-changing grant). And the institutions are too punitive and don’t provide enough welfare and compassion to help Darcy when she falls.
It’s a tragedy with so many parts that it remains impractical even for Medical Examiner Potts (now the site’s senior political reporter). Thirty five) AND Forgotten girls oscillates a bit between the personal and the political, which seems less focused than Tara Westwood’s. learned, a treatise to which it is often compared. It’s also strange when we’re told that Potts and her partner are back in Clinton. Why, when she wrote an entire book about how she was so desperate to get out?
However, it is a very touching book that brings together many of the concerns about the economic, religious, and political problems of the Bible Belt. I thought about it a few days later, not only from an American perspective, but also thinking about what parts of the UK could also feel so disenfranchised and neglected, with such low self-esteem, that catastrophically low life expectancy could become inevitable?
Source: I News
I am Mario Pickle and I work in the news website industry as an author. I have been with 24 News Reporters for over 3 years, where I specialize in entertainment-related topics such as books, films, and other media. My background is in film studies and journalism, giving me the knowledge to write engaging pieces that appeal to a wide variety of readers.