Live Through This: A Mother's Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780547248011)

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.

Author: Debra Gwartney
ISBN-10: 0547248016
ISBN-13: 9780547248011
Publisher: Mariner Books
Language: English
Published: 02/17/2010
Pages: 240
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.48lbs
Size: 7.96h x 5.36w x 0.57d
Award: National Book Critics Circle Award - Finalist