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An "achingly beautiful" memoir about a mother's mission to rescue her two teenage daughters from the streets and bring them back home (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). 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.
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Reviews
"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 chroni
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