The Forgotten Girls: a Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America. By Monica Potts. Penguin £10.99.
The author was born and brought up in the small town of Clinton in Arkansas. Her book has two main themes: life, especially for women, in an isolated area, and the story of her friend Darci.
Like much of the rural US, Clinton has social and economic problems, made worse by the 2007–8 crash. Services such as schools and post offices are closing, industries are leaving, and poor white people – women, especially – are dying younger than a generation ago. Clinton is part of the Bible Belt, and evangelical churches are very powerful. There are high rates of sexual abuse and childhood trauma, and women in particular are discriminated against. ‘The church set girls up to be of service to everyone and in charge of nothing’ and ‘Women were held morally responsible for everything that happened in their families and communities. They were supposed to sacrifice everything for their children, even their own happiness and mental health.’ They find it hard to imagine a single life and are expected to do what their husbands tell them. There is a high rate of teenage births, and what sex education there is emphasises abstinence. The area is very conservative, is strongly anti-abortion and supports Trump.
Potts was, partly by chance, able to move away, attend college and become a journalist, though she later moved back to Clinton with her partner. Darci, however, was not so lucky. She lost her virginity at fourteen (to an eighteen-year-old); another local girl got married at fifteen, to a man nine years older. By the age of sixteen, Darci had a live-in boyfriend. She had some talent as a musician and played at music festivals, but drug-taking meant she missed so much attendance that she was unable to graduate from high school. She was emotionally and physically abused by partners, and had two children in her twenties. She stole smallish sums from an employer, but this eventually totalled $13,000, and she was sentenced to probation. Various jail spells followed drug charges and violating probation.
One of Potts’ cousins says to her: ‘Can you imagine waking up in your life, at thirty-five, and realising you have nothing?’ This aptly characterises the lives of Darci and people (not just women) like her: they are depressed, break the law in various ways, go to jail, are released, but then the cycle starts again. Poor white people are badly off, but feel that at least they are not black and at the bottom of the ‘rigid racial hierarchy’.
This is a vivid account of working-class life in some of the poorest parts of the US, and a reminder of how capitalism treats so many people in the ‘land of the free’.
Paul Bennett
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