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Title details for Live Through This by Debra Gwartney - Wait list

Live Through This

A Mother's Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love

by Debra Gwartney
Joyce Bean
Audiobook
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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 toward 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.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Awards

  • Release date

    March 30, 2009

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781400190683
      • File size: 263388 KB
      • Duration: 09:08:43

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      When her two oldest of four daughters decide to live on the streets, Debra Gwartney has to find a way to take control. Joyce Bean's narration portrays Gwartney as a woman on the edge of unrestrained emotions. Bean appropriately expresses the layers of torment the author faces--her guilt and remorse over her divorce and how it affected her children, her conflict over the foster parents who both run her children's lives and deal with their difficult behavior, and her mix of caring and resentment as the young teens cut themselves, steal, and avoid her love. Bean's tight, strained narration corresponds to the story's tension. Her delivery of the author's candid reflections makes listeners hope for the family's resolution. S.W. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      October 13, 2008
      After Gwartney and her husband—“two people who didn't belong in a marriage together but who couldn't manage to find a decent way to split up”—divorce, her two older daughters, barely in their teens, run away. In this bitingly honest memoir, Gwartney, a former correspondent for Newsweek
      , tells of her daughters' paths of self-destruction as street children, with intervening stints in various treatment centers (among them, a state group home, the foster child program, a “wilderness-therapy program”). As daughters Amanda and Stephanie move back and forth between their parents' homes of squabbles and angry rebellion and the street world of self-maiming—socially (dropping out of school), physically (drugs, scabies), emotionally (attempted suicide)—Gwartney builds a life around trying to bring them home again, into which her younger daughters, Mollie and Mary, are inexorably drawn. After a grim and frustrating two years, she is successful. Gwartney's memoir, however, is not just about the runaways; rather it's a reflection of her emotional state as months go by not knowing where one or the other daughter is. Her story was originally told in an episode of public radio's This American Life
      . While she occasionally overwrites, she offers readers comfort and some hope.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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This project was made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Funding for additional materials was made possible by a grant from the New Hampshire Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities.