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    Live Through This: A Mother's Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love
    Live Through This: A Mother's Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love
    Live Through This: A Mother's Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love
    Audiobook9 hours

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

    Written by Debra Gwartney

    Narrated by Joyce Bean

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    About this audiobook

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateMar 30, 2009
    ISBN9781400180684
    Author

    Debra Gwartney

    Debra Gwartney is the author of Live Through This: A Mother’s Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love and the coeditor of Home Ground: A Guide to the American Landscape. She teaches in Pacific University’s MFA in Writing program and lives in Western Oregon.

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    Reviews for Live Through This

    4/5

    29 ratings2 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Wow! What can I say but I owe my mother everything! I’m astonished she was able to put this into words, the things we don’t talk about. The things, some of us get to live through…
    • 5/5
      This book brought me to tears. As a mother I was moved by the honesty of the author, as it's very hard to admit things publicly about your children and yourself that will be viewed negatively. We all want perfect children...be perfect mothers...have the perfect home... But that can never happen and we all know that to. But we don't go around and broadcast it. This mother has. And I applaud her. What she said to me was it's ok to screw up as a parent it doesn't make every wrong choice your child makes your fault. If you've ever had a "wild" child or just a strained relationship with a child that you can't figure out "what did I do wrong" (which is where I was reading this book) you owe it to yourself and the child to read this. It helped me see my child and me in a whole different light and also to know that it is never to late for healing. 

      2 people found this helpful