Subtitled: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America
Nonfiction by Monica Potts
According to some recent data, the "least educated" of white Americans, particularly women and especially in rural areas, have experienced a significant drop in life expectancy. This author, a reporter, decided to try to investigate the reason why the simple lack of a high school degree could possibly cut off years of living for these people.
Monica Potts grew up in a rural town in the Ozarks, but escaped to the city as an adult. She decided to go back to her hometown of Clinton, Arkansas, to research the lives of people there. This book is the result.
Monica spends much of the book telling the story of Darci, her friend from childhood who stayed in Clinton, and how lack of education and trouble with drug abuse ruined Darci’s life. Monica contrasts her own “successful” life (good career, stable relationships, financial security) with Darci’s “failure” (abusive relationships, jail time, kids in state custody).
Darci’s story is what makes the book interesting (the rest is speculation and pontificating) but it also doesn’t really make the point the author wants to make, in my opinion. (Also it’s a bit smug on Monica’s part.) The author wants to say that Darci could have been “saved”simply by getting more education and leaving the area.
But people’s lives are so much more complex than that! There are a myriad of factors involved in Darci’s “failed” life, which I have to point out ISN’T OVER! I kept expecting Darci to die at the end of the book, the way Monica talked about her, but she didn’t! (Ooops! Spoiler!) The poor girl wasn’t even forty years old when the story ended, and who in the world is qualified to deem anyone’s entire life a failure, for that matter!
But I digress. This book was interesting to read, (and obviously invoked quite an emotional reaction from me!) but it didn’t really make much of a case for the life-saving properties of a diploma.
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