 My name is Mark Schmidt. I'm the director of the political reform program at New America, and I'm going to introduce this event with Monica Potts to honor to discuss her new book about her experiences and her relationship with her best friend from childhood in Arkansas, a really wonderful piece of work. I just want to say a couple of things. I asked to be able to do this introduction because 13 years ago when I was the executive editor of the American prospect magazine, Monica Potts joined us as a staff writer and contributed a lot of wonderful work. And I've really been, you know, it's really been a joy to watch her writing and work evolve over the 13 years since then. And to really become, I think, probably the best writer about economic hardship and poverty in the United States right now. And I don't say that lightly. I think some, I think, you know, some writing about economic hardship and poverty is, you know, to be kind of clinical and data driven, which is fine as a place. Some can be a little pitying and has some distance even as people immerse themselves in people's lives. And I think Monica has just an incredible ability to immerse herself and also draw out what we may not be familiar with about people's lives. It's wonderful to to to watch. The other thing that I want to say about Monica that's always really struck me as this book is a memoir, but a lot of people's first instinct is to is memoirs to write about themselves, people are told right what you know and what you know is yourself. And what always struck me from the beginning was that like that was never Monica's first it's her first instinct was always to learn about things she didn't immerse herself in things she didn't know about and write more about them. And I feel like she's kind of looped around to seeing that her own community her own family her own experiences are, you know, a really important force in in in shaping what she writes and so it's been a really fascinating to watch that evolution in her writing that's that's led up to this wonderful book. So I'm just going to get out of the way and turn it over to conversation between Monica to is a was a new America fellow in 2016 and has maintained all kinds of affiliations with this with this wonderful organization as people do in in conversation with Larissa McParker who was also a new America fellow in 2018 and is a New Yorker writer, and also, you know terrific writer that about all these issues so with that I'm really glad you're all here and welcome to a conversation with with Monica box. Thank you. Thank you mark and again, welcoming everyone to thank you for joining the new America fellows program for this discussion of the forgotten girls and memoir friendship and lost promise in rural America by Monica pots. I just want to add to what's just been said that this book is, it is. It reads like a novel it is incredibly moving, but at the same time it answers a crucial question, writing about rural poverty tends to either focus on the person who gets out and that's the sort of American up by the bootstraps. The narrative, or the people who are unable to get out or have not gotten out and the brilliance and originality of this book is that it does both, and therefore, looks without ever being as as you said to data driven or to sociological looks in an incredibly personal way at what, what caused that divergence. I'm, as you heard, Larissa McFarker at 2018 Emerson collected fellow at New America. I'm a writer at the New Yorker and the author of strangers drowning a book about radical altruism. And before we start a few housekeeping notes, as you heard, but I want to emphasize again. If you have questions during the event, please submit them in the question function the q amp a function and we'll get to them at the second half of the event. And most importantly copies of the forgotten girls are available. You can buy them through our bookselling partner which is solid state books, and you can find a link to buying them on this page. Click the buy this book function and button excuse me and believe me you're really going to want to do that. Monica pots is, as you heard a 2016 National Fellow and a senior politics reporter for 538 the website, and her work has appeared in the New York Times the Atlantic, and the New Republic among other publications, and on NPR. Thank you for doing this event with us Monica. Thank you so much for having me and thanks to mark and to you for those lovely introductions I'm excited to be here. Oh, it's it's, I want to do everything I can to make sure this book is read by as many people as possible. So, I, Mark and I gave a very brief outline of your project but I'm before we get started, assuming that a lot of people here will not have read your book yet. Could you describe the story of it in a broad in broad strokes just so we know where we are what kind of story we're, we're talking about. Yes, so starting about a decade ago, we started to see a decline in life expectancy among the least educated Americans in the United States and that was driven largely by a decline in the least educated white Americans in the US and so I saw this as somebody in the area, and rural Arkansas in the southern edge of the Ozarks this town called Clinton that I grew up in, and I recognized that the populations being described as suffering the, these bad health events that later became to be called death despair by Angus Deaton and in case at Princeton, which is a trio of suicides depression and alcohol related deaths, and some other deaths that led to earlier deaths in for among this population and also more middle population so it was causing a decline in life expectancy in the US. I recognize that this was a population I was familiar with that this was the population I had left when I had grown up in Clinton and gone away to college and I came back home, looking for a way to tell the story in a really personal way because I wanted it to be an insiders few I wanted to sort of revisit what it was like growing up here in a way to tell the story completely I think from start to finish and it I've, I reconnected with my childhood best friend Darcy, who's who did not graduate from high school when I did and went off to college so I reconnected with Darcy I retraced our childhoods. I talked about the ambition and excitement that we shared as young kids the idea of getting out of Clinton which we both shared. We used to look through an atlas and imagine living in a real town, because Clinton is about 2000 people we didn't live in neighborhoods like what we saw on TV. We dreamed of going to California and changing the world. And so I reach a chase that childhood and then I followed what happened to each of us as I left and she stayed. What did you sort of, I mean, there are many ways in which Darcy's life and family were different from yours. The crucial thing you're examining is the point at which your lives began to diverge because as you said when you were young kids like elementary school middle school you shared the reason you were such close friends as you shared this ambition academic talent, but your lives turned out very differently so can you sort of talk about the point probably in high school when your lives began to diverge yours and Darcy's and as an adult what you think the causes were what were the reasons. Well, I think it, I think it started even a little bit earlier really junior high when I was got I had, I kept journals when I was a child and I interviewed Darcy and a bunch of other people and I was really surprised. Looking back as an adult at how young we started to kind of have different experiences and how adults some of those experiences were for my peers. And what I mean by that is really in junior high Darcy started kind of sneaking out and party going to parties with older kids and some of it was really I think kind of innocent it was something that kids do everywhere. I think what was different for us is that we were in a small town where you kind of live in a fishbowl. And it was also a really judgmental town it's in some ways it's a very evangelical community and there are very strict guidelines on how people think children especially girls should act. So Darcy started to, I think fall into the camp that people called the bad kids, she started to party, her house became a party zone. She started to date boys when she was really young, she and some of my other friends had very young experiences with much older boys that I think now as an adult I see is really inappropriate. And so tracing back that I think it was a pattern of her really not finding adults at that time in her life to intervene and steer her in a different direction and give some grace and kind of think about ways that she might be learning and think about ways to help her focus on school, get on the right track in her studies and kind of stay focused on what her dreams and goals were. And I mean along the same lines I was going to ask you and it seemed your mom was not only extremely determined that you get out of Clinton, but she seemed to have a pretty good sense of what that would take and what she needed to do and what you needed to do. Could you tell me a bit about about that and like how did she, how did she figure that out how did she know, but but but what did she know more importantly, like, what did she know. She knew that we needed to have kind of a single minded focus on leaving Clinton from the time that we were very young. And she also in she encouraged us to study she encouraged us to think big. She encouraged us to not feel limited. I think that one of the things I explore is that in a very, a very traditional conservative community where people have very traditional gender norm ideas. The ideas of what girls could do with were kind of limited we were expected to grow up and become wives and mothers. In some cases we were explicitly told that we were going to be help meets for our husband or future husbands. And that was sort of the orientation I think for a lot of young girls. That was not something my mom believed she didn't appreciate life in Clinton she had left when she was young and lived in and around Chicago for some time. And I think that to what a degree that some people might think of as extreme. She focused on us not staying in Clinton and us not getting those connections and those derailments that might keep us here so we had to study we had to think big and she also connected us to opportunities wherever she found them so I think it was a combination of luck. We just happened to find opportunities and we also had a sense that we should take them when we when we had them. One of the stories that I describe is that my mom just from her reading, she was a really avid reader had seen that a lot of women writers went to a college and she didn't know how to pronounce it and she didn't remember what it was she thought it was Brina or something like that. Now I know that it was Bryn Maher which is where I ended up going to school. And she encouraged me to send my scores there when I started taking the ACT for practice and I sent my scores to all these women's I heard back from Barnard when I was only a sophomore, I called them and I said, thank you for sending me these application materials but I'm only a sophomore I can't go to college yet. And they sent me information about a summer pre college program which I applied and got into. I called and I said thank you for accepting me to this I can't afford it. And they found a scholarship for me to be able to go. And so the summer I was 16 years old I spent in New York taking college classes at Barnard College. It was really a life changing event that connected some of my dreams and ambitions to a reality, a sense that it could really happen. I mean something you you point out in the book that I've, it's driven me crazy for years is is the fact that so many people, very logically assume that they more prestigious the college the more expensive it will be, and that the cheaper option is to go to a local college and sometimes that's true but if your scores are good enough, going to a fancy college can actually be cheaper because the scholarship money available is is is there's so much more. It would seem that that would be a sort of easy social fix to make to spread that little but crucial piece of information to the kind of schools that you went to. Do you think that colleges don't actually want kids to know like why why is that little crucial piece of information so hard to come by for kids like you and Darcy. You know, I, I don't know I think about that a lot and it also drives me. It's also something that really bugs me and it's bug me for years because I it seems like low hanging fruit to get information to all the college or all the high school valedictorians and tell them that they can apply. If your scores are good enough and you can get in and also if your family's income low enough and very many colleges you won't have to pay anything intuition and often room and board. And I think that it's a combination of, there's probably logistical challenges a town like Clinton is very small, you're not going to get a lot of applicants from a place like this. But I don't know the answer because it be hooves colleges to have applicants and especially qualified applicants from around the country so I'm not sure why they don't work harder to do that. It's very frustrating. I found your discussion of the marshmallow test really fascinating because you know as as I'm sure everyone on this call knows. I don't know what you'd explain with marshmallow test is but but the assumption is, I think, broadly that the people who managed to, to succeed, like you have some kind of quality of personal determination or will or it's a it's a matter who who gets out like you and who does not like your friend Darcy and you critique that notion can you tell us a bit about the marshmallow test. Yeah. As you said it's it's a it's something that's really well known but it's this idea that if you put a marshmallow in front of a child and they can wait five minutes and get a second marshmallow. If they can withstand that test and get that bigger reward for the, for the price of waiting that that tells you something about their grit and their character and their ability to persevere. I do. I spoke with a researcher who had complicated the findings from those earlier studies. When researchers look at the whole of a child's life. They tend to find that the ability, the marshmallow test is sort of more of a symptom than of other things that when you look at sociological or socio economic status when you look at their mom's education, all the other markers that we tend to associate with how a child will do later in life. The marshmallow test just kind of fades away as important importance. But I think there's something about the United States that people want to grab on to that idea that there's just this sense that all you need is is just this personality that can pick yourself up from your bootstraps that is all you need to succeed. And I think that you really have to look at a whole person's life because Darcy had that ambition Darcy had that ability and she ran into problems I think that overwhelmed her as a teenager and you, you also need I think other things around you that allow you to take advantage of opportunity and to see it when it's there. And you need to look at a whole person's it's just the whole problems that people face in the whole of the course of their lives are just not solvable by one neat trick. It's just not the way that life works I think. Another sort of thread of your analysis of how your life diverged from Darcy's is religion. You mentioned that she, like most people in your town comes from a family of evangelical Protestants, in which there's a kind of sort of theological fatalism as you describe it. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that like do you think, I mean one can draw a theoretical connection between a kind of theological fatalism and a real life passivity but do you think it actually, does it work like that can you see it working in actual people, their beliefs about God their beliefs about what they're able to do in life and what they, how they live their lives. You see a connection, I think it also matters that, you know, this is an area without a lot of resources, it's a small area with a fairly low median income and so that it's not people who are as used to being able to make things that they want to see reality and so if you know there's a problem in town, you know something needs fixed something needs to be rebuilt it's going to require relying on outside sources outside resources, it's going to require a lot of resources to the town itself may not have and so I think when you live in those kinds of conditions, it becomes easier to believe that the God just has a plan for you you just have to accept it. I think people believe that and then that shapes how they respond to challenges that if God has laid out a path for you that that it's. I think a lot of people believe it's actually almost arrogant to challenge it to try to change the course of your life. If that's what God's laid out for you, and I, I also think that if you're in the conditions of your life are maybe not great, then it does become tempting to believe that there's a better world for you in heaven. And I think that's another thing that people believe that God is a temporary home that our real home is in heaven with God. That's not something my mom ever believed she always thought you should take action if if there was some kind of challenge before you. I think a lot about my sister's diagnosis with Tourette syndrome she really took the bull by the horns with that and made sure that she got the care that she needed and she got the interventions that she needed at school so that she could succeed in school. I think that those that kind of difference that kind of different view on life did make a difference for us because she never would have just said, Oh well this is just, you know, God's plan this is just the cross that we have to bear. Well, speaking of crosses that you have to bear I mean one of the, one of for me the most shocking moments of the book is when a friend's a friend of yours mother Susie tells you that not only was she molested as a child, but that half the girls in Clinton were to. Could you talk a bit about that. What do you. Well, I think and she was, she really described and this was something I heard from other people as well. Just a really common. Experience of abuse and neglect in this town. And I think that not not in addition to being molested I think that girls became sexual objects really young. I saw that happen with a lot of my friends older boys would target them older boys would try to date younger women older boys would try to sexualize younger girls. And I think that that was an experience that also kind of shaped how people. Susie described a town that was living with trauma, this kind of collective trauma and individual trauma that people didn't talk about. And that was something that really rang true with me because I can see it and I've experienced it and Darcy's experienced it and I think without without health care, without a really good acknowledgement of what that means and how to recover from it, then you are going to have a population that struggles to overcome future challenges and to really thrive, people can survive almost anything. But when you think about what it takes to actually thrive, you need that kind of base of happiness and safety that I think people maybe don't feel here. I mean you, you also wrote that the CDC found that Arkansas had the highest rate of childhood trauma in the whole country. Why is that I mean there are a lot of places that are poor and why Arkansas, what specifically about Arkansas. Yeah, that year was 2019 and I think that other states that have really high rates of adverse childhood effects, I think it's what it's called, are all also poor and rule, and have don't have a lot of resources for kind of a collective safety way of dealing with those problems because you're always going to have people individual people who experience adverse effects but it's really how your community deals with it how your community reacts to it, the kinds of resources you can draw on within your community and within your family and within your health care system. And I think that when you look at the very role, very poor states without a lot of those kind of collective resources you see those rates of childhood trauma and those rates of childhood adverse effects that it are really hard to overcome. We know now that things like divorce and abuse and neglect and all those things have really long lasting effects on people and overcoming that is not something people can do on their own. But it's really interesting what you've just said because so I think again in terms of of cliches about about community and and the way people live would have that small towns would be the very place where you would have a community safety net where you would have a community that can gather on their own etc whereas like, you know, other kinds of poor places like like cities would have less of that but you're saying the opposite that in fact it's in those rural small towns where community safety net is completely absent can you can you explain that like why is that worse in a place where everyone knows each other. Yeah, I think it's worse in a place where everyone knows each other partly because everyone does know each other. So everyone knows your business or has the potential to know your business I think it at the instinct then is to hide your troubles. It can feel like living in a fishbowl when you're in a small town. You don't want people to know everything about your life and sometimes it feels like they know everything about your life without you ever uttering a word. So I think that and they know things about your family's life they know things about your parents that actually can be very isolating. I've actually always found the opposite to be true I've always found that rural areas can be very isolating and it's harder to build a sense of community. This sounds very basic but I live pretty close to town but if I go out my door. I can't walk down a sidewalk and just walk to the store and see people that I know just fellow, you know towns members and wave high and have that sense of community people in their cars instead. I can walk places but I have to walk through like a weedy sneaky ditch like it's not really well cared for necessarily all the time I think cities are the opposite you can have that sense of public space of third spaces if you have a neighbor who's really you can help them sweep their stoop in the fall. I've seen that happen in the cities that I live in I think cities are extremely friendly and it's easier to build those kinds of connections that are different from close friends and different from family but are really really important. And I think small towns are a little bit harder to do that and I think it's something I think about a lot is how to rethink the kinds of physical spaces people live into increase happiness and decrease loneliness. I think that's I mean that's one of the most original and important aspects of your book is the way that you show what you just said. And one at some point you asked yourself a really, a really brave question and that startled me actually I did not expect this question you said, at what point, if any did I bear responsibility for what happened to Darcy. And I guess I would ask you not to not to tell the whole story but to tell us a little bit about what did happen to Darcy, and then talk about, you know, years on having got reconnected with her and immersed yourself deeply in her story. How would you answer that question. Yeah, I left for college Darcy did not graduate from high school, she stayed in town. She really struggled in a lot of different ways she had experiences with substance use disorder. She had experiences with bad relationships destructive relationships. She became a mom at a pretty young age and had two children and continued to struggle through her life with poverty with substance use disorders and that was this. That was how I found her when I when I came back is in the midst of those struggles. I no longer blame myself for the challenges that I had confronting what I saw coming I think when I was a teenager. It's hard to remember what it feels like to be a child basically but I know that when I was 13 and 14 and 15 I felt that Darcy needed help, and that she needed an intervention of some sort. And I thought that there were people who should have worked harder to do that for her. And I felt guilty for not having raised the alarm. I no longer feel guilty for that because I think I was going through my own teenage travails and that I didn't know what to do or how to do it and I don't know if I would have been able to personally help anyway. Because I was also a kid. I regret not staying in touch with Darcy through the years, and I wish that we had stayed closer when I left for college. And I sometimes wonder if that had helped, but I did go through periods of really being angry. Because I felt that there were people who were in a better position than I was adults who could have intervened and help Darcy Darcy was really good at hiding her problems but I'm still amazed that no one saw what happened to her coming. And that's something that I can imagine why you were so angry. I mean, if I'm remembering right it was it was something like Darcy was just told by the school, oh you've missed too many days. It's too late you cannot graduate, but no one had told her along the way like if you miss another 30 days, you're not going to be able to graduate like that is so shocking that that nobody in the school warned her that this was the consequence because it sounded like she did not know. Yeah, as far as she remembers she didn't know and nobody intervened and it seems that at some point somebody should have said Darcy is missing a lot of school let's sit down and have a talk with her and her mom. I think there was also an attitude then this was before no child left behind this was before we really focused on getting more kids to graduate from high school. There was an attitude as well that 18 year olds made their own choices that when you're 18 you're an adult, and if you don't want to go to school nobody's going to make you go to school. And that was really prevalent in our rule town to you know the focus was on the kids who wanted to be there, who wanted to go on to college how to get them their best opportunity, and I don't necessarily blame people for that there's limited resources and so you kind of want to focus on where you feel like you're going to actually make a difference and so I also think at the time you know Darcy still had good grades Darcy still did not seem to be in crisis and so you know there were there are kids who are in much bigger crises, almost all the time. Kids who aren't eating at home kids use parents are abusive kids who are living on their own in their car. There are kinds of things that happen everywhere and you know we rely on schools a lot to solve almost all of those problems. That is very true. So, one of the, well, it's not a twist in the book because you say it at the beginning but if you're again for people who are listening to this who have not read the book. One of the surprises of the story is that you Monica and your partner decided at some point to move back into after you had worked to get out of it always wanted to leave your mother determined that you would leave. Can you tell me a bit about that decision. I mean I was, I was coming back a lot anyway partly for the book and I found that I was enjoying my time here. I think when I get older I realized that there were aspects of life in Arkansas that I hadn't been able to fully appreciate because I've been so focused on leaving. There are aspects of country life that feel like home to me that I like I think this area is beautiful. I love physically being here I love exploring the natural world here. It felt like home to me and I never really felt kind of rooted anywhere else I have, I have deep roots here, and my mom is still here and I wanted to be closer to her for a little while. And my partner was into the idea it's beautiful. There's a lot of opportunity here if you want to, if you're in a position where you can take it I think I wouldn't have come back if I wasn't already established in my career and freelancing at that time and able to work remotely. I think also, it was time for me to kind of close the book on Clinton as an adult I needed to, I needed to think about it again in a new different way before I moved on with the rest of my adulthood. And what kind of, how did your mom react when you said you were going to move back to your mom who spent her whole life getting you out. She tried to talk us out of it for several weeks, and she wasn't very happy about it. And she still is where she wants us to leave, and she wants to leave now. But you know, I think that it was, I think it was good. It was, it was what I needed and it was what I think she needed even though she wouldn't admit it. So tell me, I mean you said that life in Clinton was more difficult than you anticipated, and especially during the pandemic, you tell me a bit about like, you know now that you've been there for several years. You know what were the, you should talk a little bit about the good parts, what are the difficult parts of going back as an adult. The difficult parts are those lack of resources, there just aren't, there isn't the same level of ability to meet challenges that I think you would see in a place with more community level resources, more infrastructure. Those kinds of things are actually difficult to live with. We don't really have a, like, that's very abstract. Yeah. We actually don't have a, we don't have a animal shelter really here operating now. And so if stray dogs end up in your yard, you, there's nowhere to call. So you have to, you have to put in the effort of finding who that dog belongs to. And if it doesn't belong to anyone, you have to decide how much you're going to care about the life of that stray dog. And that can actually have knock on effects to human health, like straight dogs running around is not a good thing for communities to have to deal with. Dogs get hit on the road all the time. They can cause accidents. It's sad for the animals. It's an animal will for question as well as a human health question. Those kinds of things, where are you down. I think if you are in a place where you see this lack of ability to deal with a really simple and predictable problem. It makes it harder to think about it kind of takes energy that could be used elsewhere. I think my biggest hope for this community is that they see that they actually do have resources in each other and they can come together to solve some of these problems. There are other issues to funding for things like the library funding for things like the volunteer fire departments, which are all volunteer. Those things are sort of always in question. And so that takes a level of safety, filling a safe and secure away from you. I think if you're living here the lack of sidewalks, which I talked about, I would just love more than anything that for this to be the place where I could walk down the sidewalk and see people I know easily without all the challenge and to feel like there's a town that I'm a community member of in a way that is I think difficult here on another level to there was not good broadband when I first moved here it actually made it hard to work remotely. So those kinds of things take energy away from bigger issues and bigger problems because every day you're doing things like taking your own trash to the dump because there's no truck you know trash pickup. I, we tend to think of those things as really small, but they add up to be difficult problems that people are spending their time and energy dealing with instead of the bigger, the bigger problems does that make sense. Oh, absolutely. I mean that's, that's the kind of concrete example that you can absolutely see. And one thing that that was really striking to me was that your mother, when you moved away. She couldn't really imagine that you could leave Clinton and have a good life, while remaining connected to family and friends and Clinton and herself said something similar and you probably, you know inherited that feeling from her you said quote, I went home less and less often even missing the holidays until some years I did not go home at all. When I left the town behind I lost its people. I could have continued to be friends Darcy or anyone from Clinton but I didn't want to, or really I thought I couldn't. They were what I sacrificed. I excised them all for my life and went forward in colleges if I had no history. Tell me a bit about I mean obviously we have phones we have internet like, you know it's not a logistical thing can you tell me about that feeling that both you and your mother had that it was, you know, leaving minutes leaving everyone behind. Yeah, I think I thought that there would be problems that would drag me down that there would be some kind of life event that I would not be able to withstand emotionally. So that it would make being in a place like Bryn Mawr college or working in a place like New York where I moved after college harder. I think she still thought and maybe I absorbed that we needed the whole force of my energy to keep me going forward in life. And I think that was because of her own experience she had a trauma in her life that brought her back home and I think I think the idea that you can have an adverse life effect like event that you can seek therapy if you need it that you can move forward without just something completely in life. I think that's something that you take maybe take for granted if you are from, you know, a sense of if you come from a sense of stability that we just didn't have here. I think we always thought that any little thing could knock us off of our course. And I think that that's where that came from. I was very happy to reconnect with some of my high school friends when I moved back here because I, it was nice to think about how that wasn't necessarily necessary and to sort of reconnect with people and restitch those relationships back together. So, I can still join my conversation I forgot to remind everybody to put questions in the question box. I'm going to ask Monica a couple more questions myself but in five minutes, we're going to go to audience questions so please do submit any questions have as soon as you can. So, so I mean, I mean I wanted to ask you more but I should, should go to this next question because I do want to ask you this. Near the end of the book you write. Well, this was what still pinned Darcy and me together, the essential thing we still had in common. We shared a desire for a messy life. We both had a fear of being too settled of being trapped. And we've talked a lot about how extremely different your lives were. But you here seem to be grasping for what remains of that sort of spirit connection that you had as children, the feeling that you are in some really basic sense, similar people. I don't know more about that because, you know, clearly what your, or not clearly how it seems to me looking from the outside it seems that your sense of a messy life is very very different from Darcy's what did you mean by that. Yeah, I think Darcy would probably describe us as both hippies. I am. I never, I never really wanted to get married. I'm still not married I am partnered but I still kind of don't want to get married. I never wanted to stay in one place too long I actually did sort of move around a lot I, I went to college outside of Philadelphia, then I went to New York, then I spent some time in Connecticut, then I moved to DC, then I left DC, and then I uprooted my life to come back to this town I didn't ever bring up and I think part of what I enjoyed about moving back was that is that feeling of kind of bouncing around and and exploring new spaces and being new places and I think whenever I've had the opportunity, I've never been the kind of person who wanted a desk job. I always wanted to move and be moving and go new places and see new things. I think that that's what I kind of still share with Darcy is that she has that sense of movement and that sense of forward motion in her life that can be really good if it's channeled I think in the right way. I think that's what I tried to do was find a career in journalism that would suit that impulse of mine, and find a way to live that would enable me to feel that sense of bouncing around without kind of self destructing. And do you think you'll bounce again. Are you going to be in Clinton for long or are you going to bounce out again. We're going to bounce out again. I don't know where we're going. Sameer gets to choose because it's his turn. Okay, I'm going to with that I'm going to switch to the audience questions document. Okay. So here's the first question, which is a really crucial one. What factors have you and the women you wrote about identified as key to improving their quality of life and lessening those deaths of despair. I, I should end I should. I should say that I think that really good mental health care, reaching into all the corners of the country is really, really, really important. I think we know now I think it's pretty well known that a lot of substance use disorders has to do with untreated mental health problems. I think there's a lot of co, you know, co diagnoses whenever people finally seek treatment. I think dealing with those traumas that I talked about dealing with those adverse effects that can go back to childhood sometimes. That is really key to I think people living better lives whether they have are, you know, facing a death of despair or not. I think that that involves a lot more resources now and then a lot of communities have but I think that's where I would start for sure is better mental health care better health care. Somebody else asks, could you have written this book is anything but a memoir did you consider a more traditionally reported form. I did consider a more traditionally reported form. I felt that it was important to write it as a memoir because I didn't want a sense of an outsider writing it. I wanted a sense of it coming from the inside and looking back. And also because I really wanted to tell the story about Darcy, and it would have been weird to to take myself out of that story so that was that was really the impulse there. Okay, here's another question. How does reporting on rural America shape the way you view the national political discourse. What do you want those of us outside rural areas to take away from your reporting. And I guess I would add to that, you know, you coming from a rural area what, what question, what what ignorant things drive you crazy that people say on the national level about rural areas. I think that I think you should I think people should listen to what people from rural areas are actually telling them I feel like a lot of times there's a lot of reporting about what people in rural areas want, especially politically, what they say they're voting for and then people still don't want to believe it I would just take them at the word. Like, you know, I think that there's, there's a lot of questions, you know, are, are they still going to vote for Trump and it's like they tell you they like Trump and they tell you they're going to vote for Trump so they're probably going to vote for Trump it's not it's not a puzzle you have to figure out. I think also the other thing is that rural areas are not monolithic, you know, that there's rural America overall is there's some diverse pockets in rural America there are pockets that are diversifying. So it's not a one size fits all thing. And then even within a community like mine which is overwhelmingly wide overwhelmingly working class, you're still going to see differences if you drill down. And it's, you know, my whole county has less than 17,000 people now. So it might seem like everyone's the same but they're not so it's and I think it's more important to think of it as a human place with human differences and a human, you know, human scale that it's important to kind of look, look at more deeply. Well, speaking of human differences I mean this is a question of mine I have been wanting to ask you also is. When you came back. How did people receive you, you have, you know, you've been away for a long time, you lived in all these places that were extremely different. How did people welcome you back as, as one of them, or did you seem different did you feel different like how would how did that whole dynamic work. They mostly welcome welcome to me back and I think they had also seen it as inevitable that I would come back because a lot of people do. Yeah, which is interesting because I hadn't planned on it. I, I felt different. I felt that my experiences had changed the way that I interact with with this place and get in bad ways I had different expectations for how life should look I think then I saw here which is some of the difficulties I described earlier. But I also think I appreciated it more than I was older I really hated it when I was a kid as I described in the book but I appreciated the quiet and the nature when I came back I appreciated the beauty of it. And I think that for the first, I think, for the most part, people were really welcoming and I felt like I was home for a little while. Let's, let's sort of go back a little bit to the moment of divergence and what adults could possibly have done to keep Darcy on a healthier course like, you know, there is this dynamic of once you're labeled a bad kid, you know, teachers and adults in the world giving up on you. But is there anything that, other than having mental health workers in the community which certainly would have helped as you said, speaking now not to people outside rural communities but to people inside rural communities, what would you, what would you like to have them take from your book as guideposts or things that they could do to help keep really smart kids like Darcy interested in school, thinking that school has some relevance to them. I think, I think partly increasing the opportunities at school or outside of school would help, you know, we everything at everything and Clinton was sort of revolving around sports. And so if you weren't in sports, it made it harder to feel part of the school community. But thinking about more arts, more theater, more music, more other kinds of events, you know, celebrating kids differences a little bit better. I do think the town has gotten a little bit better about that celebrating the artistic kids. But I think we could do the I spoke to a couple 19 year olds and they still felt that the artistic kids were kind of overlooked and not celebrated as much that everything revolved around sports. I think that celebrating difference is and celebrating the things that make kids who they are, instead of putting a lot of pressure on them to succeed in one certain kind of way would help. You know, I just think that it's, I think we put a lot of pressure on young kids to know exactly what they're going to do in their lives exactly how they're going to succeed after they leave high school and I feel like taking some pressure off that would help I think kids figure out who they are. It's funny because then another thing you you another little nugget from your book that really surprised me was you described. Gosh, I'm forgetting her name Caroline possibly somebody going to graduate from high school going to community college and dropping out because the classes, the classwork wasn't interesting. She'd already done a lot of it in high school and so she felt like, Oh, this is not helping me. And so in a way you feel like with that kid, what she needed was a little more cynicism like someone to tell her like, All right, even if the classes are boring, that's not necessarily, you know, you know, this this this degree, because it's going to make a difference in your life. I mean is that is that just that one person or is that a problem that you think happens a lot that the classes are just too boring so that kids can't understand why, why they're important. I think that was Cassandra. Yeah, Cassandra's a nurse now in Little Rock so she's doing very well in her life but she dropped out of her first round of college because she did fell bored and she also didn't see how it was going to immediately translate to something that she wanted to do. So I think that that it's that feeling that college has to translate immediately into what you know what you want to do. Instead of maybe college being good for you as your as a person and for your growth, you know, good for learning how to deal with a whole bunch of things that you can't predict. You know, I think that I think that that's something that people don't have here that sense that going to college is good regardless of whether you know exactly how it's going to translate into a career later on. I think that might have to do with the cost, although for Cassandra was totally free. A lot of people have told me that the classes that they take in the beginning are boring I think they have in the state universities here they have pretty strict requirements that involve like algebra to and things like that that you already taken high school. So I think that a lot of people get bored with what they call their basics and it's like a gauntlet that you have to cross through to get to the interesting classes. If I didn't have that I got to take really interesting classes right away so I think that was a benefit for me. And I think it could be a benefit for more kids to. Yeah, yeah. That was very surprising to me. Here is another question from the audience. I live in a rural unincorporated town of 1700. What can retirees do to support our local youth. How can a community foundation help solve problems. Um, teach a class and something that you know at the local library or some other venue like that like if you are a quilter or if you're, if you know how to can food or something like that try to get kids and their parents involved in learning things like that if you want to teach a cooking class see what you would have to do to make that happen. I just think that anything that can get kids and teenagers and their families engaged in in that way and create a new community for them like maybe they would meet people they wouldn't know otherwise. Maybe they would interact with people they wouldn't interact with otherwise they would learn a skill that they don't know otherwise I think those things are all about really valuable. One last question, which is, you mentioned a while back in our conversation, how transformative it was for you to do that summer program and I think Columbia, when you were still in high school. Could you describe that for us you're coming from this very small town and the other end of the country. In that summer like what did you learn what did you see what was you know how did you change in the course of that summer. Yeah, I um, it was the first time I'd ever flown on a plane, and I was wearing a polo shirt I'd gotten from Walmart and sneakers and shorts and I hopped off the plane and I was just immediately in the biggest city I'd ever seen and bigger than I had ever imagined. And I, we saw travel agents then and so we had gotten a travel agent to get a car to meet me at the airport it was like every last penny that we had to send me there. And I was dropped off at campus and I was having lunch with people there and somebody said she had forgotten her her razors to shave her legs so she was going to go to the drugstore to get some and I was like by yourself I just like blew my mind that she would go walking in a city by herself in the middle of the day even. And so that's what I ended up doing was just walking around by myself without adults around with my friends I made new friends from different places around the country. I saw rent at the time which was still original production on Broadway which I thought was the greatest musical I'd ever seen then and I, I just wanted that life I wanted to walk around New York and see plays and go to the park and eat lunch with people I knew I just it just was really eye opening for me. And I think it was also eye opening for me too because I met people who knew how to apply to colleges and knew how to go to where they wanted to go and knew how to knew how to be adventurous and didn't see geography as a barrier to their lives and I think that was really eye opening for me in some ways too because I hadn't really had experienced that in that way before. And how did it feel to be I mean you talked a lot about the fishbowl feeling of being in your town and how everyone knew everybody and knew everybody's parents and grandparents and if you were a bad kid. Now you're always a bad kid. What was it like to be in a big anonymous place like New York. I just do what I wanted and be whoever I wanted to be, and it was just this really magnificent sense of freedom of thinking about who I was and creating who I was every day, which meant, you know, experimenting with new ways of being dressing how I wanted thinking about how I wanted reading books that nobody would judge me for reading and, you know, I just was incredibly freeing I don't even know how to describe it but I felt that I had the freedom and I continue to feel that that period gave me the freedom to learn how to find out who I was as if it was this continual journey and not something that other people would decide for me or that my parents would have sort of. I would have inherited from my parents who I was which is what I always felt in the small town. So that kind of experience was invaluable to sort of encouraging me to to leave and to find a new way to grow up. Well on that hopeful note. I think we should wrap up but please everyone by and read this this book it's a really, it's a really, really moving story but as you can see there's also a lot of analysis and hope in it to for towns not just Monica's town but other towns like it. Thank you very much for joining us.