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

by Debra Gwartney

Book Overview

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,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0547054475
• ISBN13: 9780547054476
• Release Date: February 2009
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.7" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

I challenge any parent to "Live Through This"

Even parents with partners know the day-to-day challenges of raising children in a fragmented world, especially teens. Devotion to creating a safe and healthy home with family time, enrollment in after school activities and lots of parental presence is not always enough. Doing it all alone is mind boggling. My late husband specialized in troubled adolescents and his experience showed me that even the most dedicated parents have little to no control over their teens once they leave the house. What Debra Gwartney lived through in her 24-hour a day efforts to make a home for her four daughters and keep them safe brought tears to my eyes. I understand the living fear that eats away at the soul when a child makes poor choices that put their life and their future at risk. Gwartney's willingness to keep trying against all odds,even the most on-the-edge strategies, to save her daughters' lives moved me deeply. Anyone who finds fault with this parent has never walked this path. I have, but only to the tiniest fraction of what she had to endure, and I commend Gwartney's daily courageous efforts to retrieve her 2 oldest children from darkenss while managing to maintain a loving home for her 2 youngest. And all this without any support from the "system" at all. The fact that Amanda and Stephanie are alive today and living good,creative lives is testimony to Gwartney's tireless love.

Smart and honest

I agree with Cynthia's review...this is a mother's memoir, and therefore the memories she shares with such bravery and honesty are hers, not her daughters' or her ex-husband's. She admits to mistakes and resentments that some parents may find hard or uncomfortable to admit themselves, but that are real and honest nonetheless. She doesn't ask for pity, nor does she overdramatize any given situation. She lets her clean, sparse language show us how family disfunction can spiral and how every member plays a part in it.

"A Mother's Memoir"

The book is subtitled "A Mother's Memoir"; I would not have purchased it if it were "The Runaway's Memoir". I already remember that memoir because I lived it for some years: Hookup for drugs, sleep in odd place, walk around in dirty jeans, be cold, steal something, have sex with someone. This book is about the Mother and is very unique in that authentic perspective. I read it in one sitting; I applaud the Mother for not only managing to survive, but for seeing all four girls to an incredibly positive outcome.

Everything a memoir should be

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.

Recommended for parents and non-parents alike

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.