Menu
The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America
Maybe someday
48
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
34/100Critics
61/100Scholars
Author:
Monica Potts
Publisher:
Random House
Date:
May 30, 2023
Growing up gifted and poor in small-town Arkansas, Monica and Darci became fast friends even as they navigated the challenges of their declining town and tumultuous family lives. In the end, Monica got out, but Darci did not. Years later, working as a journalist covering poverty, Monica discovered that the life expectancy of women in Arkansas had steeply declined. Most painfully, her best friend was now on track to becoming a statistic. Potts pinpoints the choices that sent her and Darci on such different paths and then widens the lens to explain why those choices are so limited.
What The Reviewers Say
Potts remains to one side of the picture in her own book; this is not so much the story of her personal triumph over the odds, but how so many other promising young women, such as Darci, were blocked from following a similar path.
Potts blames a variety of systemic failings for Darci’s fate.
If I have a reservation, it’s this: it’s easy, as a writer, to expose your own life; it’s ethically awkward to do the same to the vulnerable, even with consent. Inside every writer there is a sliver of ice, it’s said, and Potts, sympathetic and non-judgmental as she is, must have needed it because holding an addict to their word can in some lights be interpreted as further exploitation.
Clear-eyed and tender.
