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A Mother's Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
February 2009
On Sale: February 11, 2009
240 pages
ISBN: 0547054475
EAN: 9780547054476
Hardcover
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Childrens
"What makes Debra Gwartney’s Live Through This special is
its literary precision, its truly startling honesty, and,
most of all, its ability to sift through pain and ashes and
find—not bitterness—but humor and, always, love. I hope
every parent in America reads this wonderful book"—Tom
Bissell, author of The Father of All Things With four young daughters and a miserably failed
marriage,Debra Gwartney moves halfway across the country,
to Eugene,Oregon, for a new job and what she hopes will be
a new life for herself and her daughters.The two oldest,
Amanda, 14, and Stephanie, 13, have a symbiotic
relationship so intense they barely know where one begins
and the other leaves off.They come to blame their mother
for their family’s dislocation, and one day the two run off
together—to the streets of their own city, then San
Francisco, then utterly gone.
Live Through This—as emotionally wrenching and ultimately
redemptive as David Sheff ’s Beautiful Boy—is the story of
Gwartney’s frantic effort to recover the beautiful,
intelligent daughters she cherishes.The harrowing
subculture of the American runaway, with its random
violence, its horrendously dangerous street drugs, and its
patchwork of hidden shelters—none of them interested in a
parent’s grief—is captured by Gwartney with brilliant
intensity.
Faced with the unraveling of the family she thought she
could hold together through blind love,Gwartney begins the
painful—and universal—journey of recognizing her own flawed
motivations as a mother.The triumph of Gwartney’s story is
its sensitive rendering of how all three, over several
years, have dug deep for forgiveness and a return to
profound love.
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