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From her unique perspective, FiveThirtyEight reporter Potts speculates about causes of the higher mortality rates found in rural southern women as compared to those raised in the rest of the country. Her approach is a longitudinal case study comparing her own story to that of a childhood friend who remained tethered to the declining Arkansas community Potts left. The author credits parental support and self-discipline for her escape from a cycle of despair that traps many women from impoverished areas. Offering intimate details of her own experience, Potts describes how small communities often fail their young people. In describing her friend’s situation, she identifies factors contributing to the rampant abuse, addiction, and injustices she witnessed while growing up. Although she cites various studies, Potts relies heavily on personal and anecdotal evidence to support her ideas and provide context. As a journalist, she proposes that her friend’s struggles reflect a trend of widespread societal decay. The picture Potts paints is a bleak one, but her memoir serves as a sincere attempt to elicit compassion for those she left behind.

Publishers Weekly
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FiveThirtyEight reporter Potts debuts with a compassionate look at the rapid decline in life expectancy among “the least educated white Americans.” In 2015, Potts began returning to her Ozark hometown of Clinton, Ark., to investigate this trend and reconnected with her childhood best friend, Darci Brawner, a single mother of two who had fallen into drug addiction. In the book’s first section, “Causes,” Potts recounts her teenage years with the free-spirited, caring, and intelligent Darci, and documents how Darci’s partying and sexual experimentation drove a wedge between them. By the time Potts gave her high school’s valedictory address, Darci had gone through a miscarriage, tried crystal meth, and missed so many days of school that she couldn’t graduate. The second half of the narrative, “Effects,” is a harrowing chronicle of Darci’s downward spiral after high school and Potts’s fraught attempts to help her after they reconnected. Throughout, Potts draws on extensive interviews with friends and family to reveal how poverty, generational trauma, substance abuse, and the suffocating righteousness of the evangelical church limit women’s options in places like Clinton. It’s a potent study of what ails the depressed pockets of rural America. Agent: Elyse Cheney, Cheney Agency. (Apr.)

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

A journalist examines the forces that allowed her to escape the limitations of a rural upbringing but caused a beloved friend to fall into poverty and despair. Driven to understand why poor, uneducated White women were dying at higher rates than ever before, Potts, a senior politics reporter for FiveThirtyEight, went back to her Ozark hometown to live and work. Her professional interest in the subject belied a more personal reason for her return. Until she left to attend Bryn Mawr, Potts had spent her childhood and adolescence growing up among the very women she was now studying. Darci, a smart girl with numerous prospects, had been her best friend. However, Darci also grew up with a mother who did not set behavioral boundaries and often relied on “God’s plan” to see her through difficulties, including her volatile marriage to Darci’s father. By contrast, the author had far stricter and more grounded parents. The Potts family centered their lives on their daughters’ success, and they moved out of town to keep them away from the wayward boys, drugs, and alcohol that could prevent them from getting an education. A set of fortuitous accidents offered Potts the opportunity to attend a Barnard pre-college summer program, which opened doors that allowed her to attend an elite college far from her hometown. In the meantime, pregnancy and a descent into drugs and alcohol led Darci to drop out, after which she began a heartbreaking slide into poverty, mental illness, violent relationships, and repeated incarceration. Potts pointedly examines the complicated relationship between two childhood friends who experienced radically different life outcomes, and she creates a compelling sociological and cultural portrait that illuminates the silent hopelessness destroying not just her own hometown, but rural communities across America. A hauntingly cleareyed and poignant memoir with strong, illustrative reportage. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.