Available:
Library | Call Number | Material Type | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
Searching... State Library of Oregon | 362.74 Gwart | 4-Week Loan | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
An intensely emotional and redemptive memoir about a mother's mission to rescue her runaway daughters
After a miserably failed marriage, Debra Gwartney moves with her four young daughters to Eugene, Oregon, for a new job and what she hopes will be a new life for herself and her family. The two oldest, Amanda, 14, and Stephanie, 13, blame their mother for what happened, and one day the two run off together--to the streets of their own city, then San Francisco, then nowhere to be found. The harrowing subculture of the American runaway, with its random violence, its horrendously dangerous street drugs, and its patchwork of hidden shelters is captured by Gwartney with brilliant intensity in Live Through This as she sets out to find her girls. Though she thought she could hold her family together by love alone, Gwartney recognizes over the course of her search where she failed. It's a testament to her strength--and to the resilience of her daughters--that after several years they are a family again, forged by both forgiveness and love.
Author Notes
Debra Gwartney is a former Oregonian newspaper reporter and worked as a correspondent for Newsweek magazine for ten years. She teaches writing at Portland State University. Gwartney is the mother of four daughters and is married to writer Barry Lopez.
Summary:
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
After Gwartney and her husband--"two people who didn't belong in a marriage together but who couldn't manage to find a decent way to split up"--divorce, her two older daughters, barely in their teens, run away. In this bitingly honest memoir, Gwartney, a former correspondent for Newsweek, tells of her daughters' paths of self-destruction as street children, with intervening stints in various treatment centers (among them, a state group home, the foster child program, a "wilderness-therapy program"). As daughters Amanda and Stephanie move back and forth between their parents' homes of squabbles and angry rebellion and the street world of self-maiming--socially (dropping out of school), physically (drugs, scabies), emotionally (attempted suicide)--Gwartney builds a life around trying to bring them home again, into which her younger daughters, Mollie and Mary, are inexorably drawn. After a grim and frustrating two years, she is successful. Gwartney's memoir, however, is not just about the runaways; rather it's a reflection of her emotional state as months go by not knowing where one or the other daughter is. Her story was originally told in an episode of public radio's This American Life. While she occasionally overwrites, she offers readers comfort and some hope. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Profoundly moving memoir of the author's agony and perseverance as she lost her two teenage daughters to the streets, and of the slow, painful reconciliation they eventually found. After divorcing her husband, Gwartney (Writing/Portland State Univ. and Univ. of Oregon) moved with her four girls from Arizona to Oregon. The divorce brought desperate sadness to the two oldest daughters, Stephanie and Amanda, who became pawns in the endless battles between their parents. Gwartney did not see at first that the girls were becoming two halves of a single alienated self. She didn't understand their angry sorrow and was bewildered that she could not find a way to fix their injuries. Both eventually succumbed to the lure of the streets, to drugs and booze, panhandling, sleeping in abandoned buildings and stumbling home when they wished, reeking of urine, filth, cigarettes and fury. When Amanda was 16 and Stephanie 14, they left for good. In the sparsest of elegant prose, Gwartney tries to make sense of it all: why this happened to her and her daughters, who is to blame, why nothingnot counseling, rehab, wilderness therapy, nor dozens of other programsdid any good. Time shifts as she writes; past episodes, remembrances and snippets of conversation intersect seamlessly with her internal dialogues of guilt and resentment. The girls did at last come home, and slowly began to save themselves. Amanda went to college, and Stephanie discovered herself at Colorado's Eagle Rock School. Yet Gwartney's relief was tempered by the thought that they had been redeemed not because of her but despite her. In 2003, Amanda gave birth to a son. As mother and daughters lay together in bed comforting the newborn, a love that was always there but lost amidst rage and recriminations was rediscovered. An achingly beautiful chronicle of unfathomable sorrow, flickering hope and quiet redemption. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
I was never going to accept that this was our real life. A real mother would know what to do. These two statements encapsulate the anguish Gwartney endures during the mid-1990s when the older two of her four daughters choose to live on the streets rather than at home in the wake of Gwartney's divorce and move from Arizona to Oregon. As she struggles to work and care for her younger daughters, Gwartney, baffled and terrified, pierced by guilt and resentment, tries everything, including a wilderness therapy program, to rescue her stubbornly feral, punk-nation daughters. Amanda and Stephanie fully support this unnerving and riveting family memoir, and Gwartney deserves high praise for her clear and lacerating prose, her refusal to assign blame or make excuses, and the stunning candor with which she offers telling glimpses into her own, and her daughters' father's, youthful recklessness and parental flounderings. Everyone concerned about self-destructive teens, and every survivor of her or his own wild times, will find Gwartney's searing chronicle of her resilient family's runaway years deeply affecting.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2008 Booklist
Library Journal Review
With surprising honesty, veteran journalist Gwartney recounts the painful years that her two oldest daughters lived as runaways. She tried everything to find them-and everything failed, including searching for them herself. She manages to look deep inside herself, asking not only "How is our family going to get through this?" but also "What could I have done differently?" The answers make for a truly absorbing read about how one mother copes with every parent's worst nightmare. Readers may remember Gwartney's story from her 2002 appearance on This American Life. Ripe for book clubs and parents who have been put through the wringer by their children. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 10/15/08; Gwartney is married to novelist Barry Lopez.]-EB (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
