What's Killing Rural White Women?

A Q&A with "The Forgotten Girls" author Monica Potts

Every once in a while, you find yourself lucky enough to read a book that fundamentally shifts your comprehension of a dynamic you thought you grasped, and adds clarity and a deeper, more human understanding to a sweeping problem. The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America by Monica Potts is that book.

I can’t say enough good things about The Forgotten Girls. It’s beautifully written, incisive, fascinating, and shines a light on an under-explored problem. For all we hear about white men and “deaths of despair” — certainly a worthy topic — we hear far less about the rural white women without college degrees who are also dying young.

Monica, a journalist who grew up in rural Arkansas, returned to her hometown to explore the story behind the statistics. What she found is a community that offers little in the way of material support for people in need, and instead hems its women in through Evangelical religious norms and patriarchal expectations, offers women few paths to independence, makes motherhood the primary path to fulfillment for women, clings to the social power of whiteness, and encourages women to make themselves dependent on unreliable men. Throughout the book, Monica explores the structural and political factors driving declining wellbeing among rural, less-educated white people, while also not shying away from the cultural norms and individual choices that leave the people she grew up with far worse off — and, crucially, exploring how those choices are shaped by a particular place with its particular rules and opportunities.

The Forgotten Girls is one of the best books you’ll read this year. Since finishing it, I haven’t stopped thinking about it. I hope you pick up a copy, and that you enjoy the below Q&A with author Monica Potts.

xx Jill

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This is a book about a depressing trend – the decreasing life expectancy of white women without college degrees – but it’s also an intimate memoir of the relationship between you and your childhood best friend. Was this the book you set out to write? How did this book take its shape?

In the early 2010s, 2012-2014, there were a series of studies about the declining life expectancy among the least-educated white women in America. I was watching that trend, and I had already written about it. I was coming back to Arkansas, and there was this impulse in my head that this was a story about the place where I had grown up. I knew deeply that there was the story of declining life expectancy here, among the people I knew and the people I grew up with.

During one of my trips, Darci had reached out to me on Facebook to say I’m still in Clinton, and it’s not a bad thing for me anymore. I met up with her, and at the end of her talking about some of the stuff she had been though, I told her about the things I had been working on, and she joked, “maybe you should just write about me.”

I wasn’t sure for a bunch of different reasons. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought that this story would have more weight and more emotional resonance if I wrote it from the inside out. So it felt to me that it should always come back to that core of friendship between these two girls who started out life in the same place.

One thing I’ve long appreciated about your writing is that you don’t fall into easy romanticization of the white working class or rural communities, which I see a lot from journalists on the left who seem to perhaps unintentionally adopt the frame that white working-class people are the Real Americans, who are hapless victims whose circumstances are entirely outside of their control. But you also avoiding the trap of only blaming individuals for their circumstances. How did you try to strike that balance in the book, of saying: There are a lot of real problems in these communities, and it’s not all the fault of individuals, but individuals also make decisions that contribute this whole?

I do think there’s a tendency on the left of romanticizing rural life and working-class white life in a way that I find counterproductive because it removes agency from people. People who live everywhere make choices, as well as live in circumstances, and so a lot of the times the choices that they make are shaped by the circumstances they are in – that’s real and very important. But it doesn’t mean that they’re puppets being misled. They are adults who have agency. I think it’s respectful to think about that. Maybe I don’t have to think about it too much because I’m from here, so it never occurred to me to romanticize life here, or to think about the people I grew up with as anything other than full autonomous adult humans with complex lives.

At the same time, it also felt very true to me that the shape your life takes is very much affected by the community you find yourself in, the place you’re in, and how it has been shaped by the people who came before you. And that’s because I left and saw how life could be totally different, even with the same challenges.

So a lot of that is with my own personal life, which is why I wanted to tell the story in a really personal way.

What you write about religion was surprising to me, as someone who grew up adjacent to Evangelical culture but not Southern culture, and also prescient: Much of what you observed as a young person, from the book bans to the sense of religion as all-encompassing but not necessary church-based, seems to now be playing out nationwide. What do you think journalists — who cover these issues but are often from or working in the big liberal cities that are central to American media — might be missing as this particular strain of censorious conservative Christianity seems to gain more power?