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An insider’s perspective on being poor, white, and female in rural America.

作为一名记者, Monica Potts ’02 has written extensively about poverty and economic opportunity for publications such as The New York Times and The Atlantic. In 2015, the professional became personal when she turned her focus to the shrinking life expectancy of America’s least educated white women. Potts, who grew up working-class poor in the foothills of the Ozarks, found a way to attend college and realize her dreams. 她最好的朋友达西, 小时候也有天赋和野心, 高中没能毕业, 对冰毒和鸦片上瘾了, 并在监狱服刑. In The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America, Potts explores the societal forces— religion, 教育, politics— that limit choices for poor white women and zeroes in on the critical moments where her life began to diverge from that of her childhood friend.

Did you have trepidation about making the story so personal?

I knew it might create issues since this was a community that I was a part of, but I realized I wanted it to be a story told from the inside out because a lot of people had been telling this story from the outside. I also realized it was a story I needed to come home for because I had a feeling of having left people behind when I went to college. So, returning and seeing what had happened in the meantime felt like the right way to tell this story.

Your book is partly about the choices people make, but often the people you write about seem quite passive.

I think that’s because they don’t have a lot of control over their lives, 他们没有很多钱, 一般来说，他们不是老板. They get their jobs from out-of-town entities like Walmart. 总有人在发号施令. And if the primary religion around town is telling you that’s the way it should be, then it just seems like whatever’s going to happen is going to happen and all you can do is respond to it. One of the biggest differences I noticed when I went to 布林莫尔 was the faith my fellow students had that they could control their lives and steer where they wanted to go. People used to talk about getting their Ph.D. as if it was just in a closet somewhere waiting for them to go retrieve it. That taught me that ambition was attainable. 这给了我很大的信心. It also gave me the language of feminism for stuff that I’d been feeling and observing my whole life but hadn’t really known how to identify or talk about.

You ended up moving back to live in Clinton, Arkansas. 为什么?

I was coming back anyway to work on the book. I was spending a lot of time here and I found I didn’t hate it anymore. I loved the natural beauty and some of the culture. 回到这里几年后, I will say I’ve been surprised about how some of the old challenges came up to hit me again. 农村生活可能非常孤立. One of the clichés about small towns is that neighbors watch out for each other. I have always found that to be truer of cities, where neighbors have to get along because they live on top of each other. 在书中, I think I was pushing against the romanticization of small-town life, because small towns can actually be really hard places to live and grow up.

寻找答案

When I started looking into why less educated, rural white women were dying and what was killing them, I thought my investigation would be straightforward. Study after study had offered answers: methamphetamines, opiates, suicide, and smoking. And yet each of these taken alone was unsatisfactory. 为什么 did a drug like meth take over in some places but not others? 为什么处方止痛药, 到处都有, 杀了贫穷, uneducated white people in greater numbers than other groups? 为什么 did the rate of suicide rise and spread in rural areas faster than elsewhere? 为什么 did some women persist in smoking even though everyone knows it’s disastrous to health? None of these questions had simple answers, but trying to answer all of them would take me past research and into the circumstances, 事故, and personal choices that fill and shape our lives.

I thought I was looking for the women most affected by these changes, those most in danger of dying: What was different about their lives and why? It turned out, though, that I was looking for only one person.

For many years, I had avoided Darci on purpose. 当我18岁离开家时, she’d been kicked out of high school weeks before graduation, 至少我记得是这样的. 在我去上大学之前, 我们在一次葬礼上说了再见, a painful capstone to an often painful childhood. I was eager to leave, to close the book on Clinton and the people in it. 之后, 我在别处建立了我的生活, I tried not to think about what I’d left behind, 我爱的人的生活是怎样的. I sensed, from little things I heard, that Darci’s life had not gone as she’d hoped. 当我终于回去的时候, I realized that my investigation would turn on all the questions science couldn’t answer, on what my best friend’s life had been like after I’d left, and on how she ended up in that trailer on top of the mountain.

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