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Live Through This: A Mother's Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love
Live Through This A Mother's Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love Author:Debra Gwartney "What makes this book special is . . . its ability to sift — through pain and ashes and find not bitterness but — not a little humor and, always, love."?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 ... more »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