Live Through This

by Gwartney, Debra

• ISBN13: 9780547054476
• ISBN10: 0547054475
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-02-11
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Summary

"What makes Debra Gwartney'sLive Through Thisspecial is its literary precision, its truly startling honesty, and, most of all, its ability to sift through pain and ashes and findnot bitternessbut humor and, always, love. I hope every parent in America reads this wonderful book"Tom Bissell, author ofThe Father of All ThingsWith 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 togetherto the streets of their own city, then San Francisco, then utterly gone. Live Through Thisas emotionally wrenching and ultimately redemptive as David Sheff 's Beautiful Boyis 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 sheltersnone of them interested in a parent's griefis 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 painfuland universaljourney 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 love.

Author Biography

DEBRA GWARTNEY is a former Oregonian newspaper reporter, and worked as a correspondent for Newsweek magazine for ten years. She is on the nonfiction writing faculty at Portland State University. Her 2002 appearance with daughters Stephanie and Amanda on This American Life garnered intense listener response. The mother of four daughters and married to the writer Barry Lopez, Gwartney lives in Eugene, Oregon.

Excerpts

I went to the front door. I made my body wide. My arms out, my feet spread. I waited there, a joke. If they wanted to go, they'd go. A part of me believed it might even be better just to get it over with and let them be gone. But this night felt different from the other times they'd left. This time it seemed that what I'd stitched together in our little house was about to follow them out the door as a long, unraveled thread.Amanada and Stephanie emerged from the bathroom and went into their bedroom next door. A few minutes later they were out again, their backs bent under the weight of loaded Army packs and their wet necks dripping Manic Panic pink and black hair color."Get out of the way, Mom," Amanda said. I reached past her and grabbed for Stephanie's skinny arm--that daughter wriggled away and I pawed the air for a purchase on either of them, but then I stumbled over a chair...The chair fell sideways and I fell with it, my hip smacking the floor with a thud. Amanda yanked open the door and she and Stephanie whirled into the night.