Book Review: The Forgotten Girls A memoir of Friendship & lost Promise in Rural America

                                            Mountain Deer in western NC

I am reading a fascinating book called The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship & Lost Promise in Rural America .  The author, Monica Potts, goes back to her small, mostly White, rural community in the Ozarks to try to understand why so many girls in these communities across this nation. 

Both Monica and her best friend, Darci, are promising young teens in Clinton, Arkansas. 

Monica ears a scholarship to an out-of-state school. Darci chooses to party and chase boys in high school and gets stuck in their rural hometown. 

This is a story that I saw get played out many times while growing up in rural northern Appalachia. I am only halfway through the book because it is so damn sad. 

The book talks about how poor, rural girls and not as encouraged to earn good grades and attain a college degree.

Both Monica and Darci came from poor families. My family was solidly middle-class, but I grew up around such rural poverty as theirs. 

Did I experience rural poverty firsthand? Thankfully the answer to that is NO. 

However, I DID see the sort of poverty that the author discusses in this book. Let me tell you about my lab partner: I'll call her Patty. 

Patty and I met in high school. We took many of the same classes but ran in completely different social circles. We spent a year dissecting various preserved critters in Anatomy and Physiology during our senior year, but never became friends. 

Her friends considered me " uppity". 

My social group was baffled that I'd even want to be friends with someone like Patty. 

I do not know what became of my bright lab partner. I do remember her telling me that she'd be the first in her family to attend a four-year college and that she wanted to study nursing. 

I hope she got out and stayed away. 

The book talks about how poor, rural girls and not as encouraged to earn good grades and attain a college degree. 

I got out, and I am forever grateful that my neurodivergent, creative hippie chick self had the opportunity to follow my parents to Northwest Florida. 

Please understand that I love the folks with whom I'd grown up. Most of them are hard-working, good people. Yet to be honest, I never " fit in" there. 

I was a shy and awkward teen. No one would have considered me " boy crazy", and I surely was NOT popular. I honestly did not care about dating and the last thing I thought about when I was in high school was settling down into marriage and motherhood at an early age. 

Although I could have been a better student, I knew my intelligence would be my ticket away from that community that always felt foreign to me-- even though that was where I'd lived for my first twenty-two years of life. 

I lived there, but it always felt like I did not belong-- and could not wait to get the hell out. 

Rural America is great for some people, but not for me. 

Sarahbeth McCarren