Live Through This: A Mother's Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love [Hardcover]

Debra Gwartney (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 11, 2009

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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.)
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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....An achingly beautiful chronicle of unfathomable sorrow, flickering hope and quiet redemption." --STARRED Kirkus

"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." --Booklist

"Debra Gwartney’s Live Through This is an extraordinary, heart-driven account of daughters lost and found, of other daughters kept close along the way, and of an underworld that’s with us everywhere, but which so few of us see."—Rick Simonson, Elliott Bay Book Company

"As I read Debra Gwartney’s harrowing memoir, I had to keep reminding myself that this was not fiction. Gwartney’s honesty about her mothering and the rawness with which she tells her story are both admirable and heartbreaking. Live Through This is utterly true, and that, combined with Gwartney’s frank storytelling, make this book unforgettable."—Ann Hood, author of The Knitting Circle and Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine

"For all the raw power of this true story and the fearless honesty of the voice telling it, what sticks out for me is the literary craft that shapes every sentence. Debra Gwartney has seen clear to the bottom of her experience, purged it of self-righteousness, and emerged with a stunningly humane and humbled awareness of life’s troubles"—Phillip Lopate, author of Totally, Tenderly, Tragically and Portrait of My Body

"Gutsy, edgy, and revelatory, Gwartney’s fast-paced tale of a family in pieces builds to a magnificent, hard-won communion. Her ability to follow the wildness in her own story uncovers truths about every parent, every child."—China Galland, author of Love Cemetery: Unburying the Secret History of Slaves and Longing for Darkness: Tara and the Black Madonna

 

 

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (February 11, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0547054475
• ISBN-13: 978-0547054476
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #961,648 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Debra Gwartney is the author of LIVE THROUGH THIS: a Mother's Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2009, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. LIVE THROUGH THIS was also named one of the top ten books of 2009 by The Oregonian and by the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association, was a national finalist for the Books for A Better Life Award, and was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award.

Debra and her husband Barry Lopez are co-editors of HOME GROUND: Language for an American Landscape, published by Trinity University Press in 2006.

They live in Western Oregon.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Everything a memoir should be, February 22, 2009

By 

C. Wycoff (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Live Through This: A Mother's Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love (Hardcover)

Live Through This (aptly titled after Hole's post-Cobain grief album, which Gwartney gave her daughters one Christmas) describes the disappearance and return of two of Gwartney's four daughters, teenage girls who chose to leave their mother and then, finally, to come back. The book details the family's collapse, month by month, and the start of its rebuilding. It exposes a truth most would prefer to avoid: There are some situations in which it's genuinely impossible to figure out the "right" thing to do.

Gwartney recounts the end of her marriage to a charming Peter Pan-- a man who tells his daughters that the child support he sends should be given directly to them as a kind of glorified allowance-- and the two daughters who simply cannot cope with their newly reconfigured family. Finding solace in the street culture of Eugene, Oregon, they begin to disappear for days and weeks at a time, a behavior that escalates until they hop a freight train and leave town, one for several months, the other for a year. During their absences, Gwartney tries to keep the rest of her family together, parenting her remaining two daughters, going to work, spending thousands of dollars on private investigators and, whenever the girls are found, rehabilitation programs and therapists and private schools. This is a book about desperation and helplessness, about grief and guilt, about accountability and loss, about love and resentment, about the unanswerable questions a mother and her daughters ask in the face of circumstances that simply make no sense.

This is a book that exonerates no one and vilifies no one. In careful, expert, calm prose, Gwartney tells this story with heartbreaking vulnerability and honesty. This is not an easy book to read, which makes doing so all the more important and worthwhile. It is life laid bare; it is everything a memoir should be.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Recommended for parents and non-parents alike, February 16, 2009

By 

M. Gershow (Eugene OR) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Live Through This: A Mother's Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love (Hardcover)

I read "Live Through This" voraciously over the course of two days. Debra Gwartney's journey through her daughters' long months of running away is painful and honest and unflinching, while making for an utterly un-put-down-able story. Her ability to consistently implicate herself in the dynamic of the threesome is not only brave, but also gives the story much of its weight and heft. The book is meticulously well-crafted while never seeming over-written or overwrought. There were a number of times, especially as I approached the end, that I wondered how the book could possibly be wrapped up in a satisfying and realistic way. The final chapter exceeded my expectations, managing to be affecting and full of surprising hope without one word of insincerity or treacly sentiment.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Taut, honest, a story of hard grace against pain, March 18, 2009

By 

B. Doyle "prose aficionado" (portland, oregon) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Live Through This: A Mother's Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love (Hardcover)

Greatest virtue -- the lean, blunt clarity of the tale and the prose. No comment, just story. And a hard story, a family shattered; but the manner of its telling, without treacle and sermon and easy conclusion and sentimentality, is a real feat. Gwartney just tells you what happened and you get to dig everyone trying to be graceful under duress -- two girls thrashing toward what they might be, and entering incredibly dangerous waters; their other sisters watching with fear; and the mother, alone, weary, terrified, trying to hold the family together. What seems, on the surface, a harrowing tale, isn't -- it's a story of shaggy courage all round. A remarkable read. Highly recommend.