The Forgotten Girls

The Forgotten Girls is a reported memoir that begins with Monica Potts driving back over Bee Branch Mountain to Clinton, Arkansas, in search of her childhood best friend, Darci. Potts is investigating a shocking statistical trend: life expectancy is falling for less-educated white Americans, especially women, in rural places like her hometown. But the deeper she reports, the more the data becomes personal—because Darci’s unraveling seems to contain the human story behind the numbers.

Through interviews, diaries, public records, and Potts’s own memories, the book traces how environment and institutions—church culture, schools, gender expectations, economic decline, weak social services—shape individual outcomes. It follows Darci’s path from bright, funny, ambitious girlhood into teen risk, early motherhood, abusive relationships, addiction, incarceration, and repeated attempts at recovery, while Potts confronts what leaving saved her from—and what it cost her to leave.

• Listeners interested in rural America, “deaths of despair,” and how big social forces show up in one life.
• Readers of memoir-journalism that blends reporting, personal history, and policy insight.
• Anyone seeking a compassionate, unsentimental look at addiction, motherhood, religion, and small-town survival.

Monica Potts is a journalist and senior politics reporter (noted in the provided text as working for FiveThirtyEight). Her work has appeared in outlets including The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The New Republic, and on NPR. She was a 2015–16 New America Fellow and lives in Clinton, Arkansas.