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

by Debra Gwartney Narrated by Joyce Bean

Overview

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.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

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. (Feb.)

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Library Journal

With surprising honesty, veteran journalist Gwartney recounts the painful years that her two oldest daughters lived as runaways. She tried everything to find them-and everything failed, including searching for them herself. She manages to look deep inside herself, asking not only "How is our family going to get through this?" but also "What could I have done differently?" The answers make for a truly absorbing read about how one mother copes with every parent's worst nightmare. Readers may remember Gwartney's story from her 2002 appearance on This American Life. Ripe for book clubs and parents who have been put through the wringer by their children. [See Prepub Alert, LJ10/15/08; Gwartney is married to novelist Barry Lopez.]
—EB

Kirkus 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. After divorcing her husband, Gwartney (Writing/Portland State Univ. and Univ. of Oregon) moved with her four girls from Arizona to Oregon. The divorce brought desperate sadness to the two oldest daughters, Stephanie and Amanda, who became pawns in the endless battles between their parents. Gwartney did not see at first that the girls were becoming two halves of a single alienated self. She didn't understand their angry sorrow and was bewildered that she could not find a way to fix their injuries. Both eventually succumbed to the lure of the streets, to drugs and booze, panhandling, sleeping in abandoned buildings and stumbling home when they wished, reeking of urine, filth, cigarettes and fury. When Amanda was 16 and Stephanie 14, they left for good. In the sparsest of elegant prose, Gwartney tries to make sense of it all: why this happened to her and her daughters, who is to blame, why nothing-not counseling, rehab, wilderness therapy, nor dozens of other programs-did any good. Time shifts as she writes; past episodes, remembrances and snippets of conversation intersect seamlessly with her internal dialogues of guilt and resentment. The girls did at last come home, and slowly began to save themselves. Amanda went to college, and Stephanie discovered herself at Colorado's Eagle Rock School. Yet Gwartney's relief was tempered by the thought that they had been redeemed not because of her but despite her. In 2003, Amanda gave birth to a son. As mother and daughters lay together in bed comforting the newborn, alove that was always there but lost amidst rage and recriminations was rediscovered. An achingly beautiful chronicle of unfathomable sorrow, flickering hope and quiet redemption.

From the Publisher

"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 chronicle of her resilient family’s runaway years deeply affecting." —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 "As I read Debra Gwartney’s harrowing memoir, I had to keep reminding myself that this was not fiction. Gwartney’s honesty about her mothering and the rawness with which she tells her story are both admirable and heartbreaking. Live Through This is utterly true, and that, combined with Gwartney’s frank storytelling, make this book unforgettable."—Ann Hood, author of The Knitting Circle and Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine "For all the raw power of this true story and the fearless honesty of the voice telling it, what sticks out for me is the literary craft that shapes every sentence. Debra Gwartney has seen clear to the bottom of her experience, purged it of self-righteousness, and emerged with a stunningly humane and humbled awareness of life’s troubles"—Phillip Lopate, author of Totally, Tenderly, Tragically and Portrait of My Body "Gutsy, edgy, and revelatory, Gwartney’s fast-paced tale of a family in pieces builds to a magnificent, hard-won communion. Her ability to follow the wildness in her own story uncovers truths about every parent, every child."—China Galland, author of Love Cemetery: Unburying the Secret History of Slaves and Longing for Darkness: Tara and the Black Madonna —

AUGUST 2009 - AudioFile

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. © AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170492831
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	03/30/2009
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

The girl next to me on the Portland city bus is bone thin and has mouse-brown hair. Her crooked horn-rimmed glasses — the temple on my side held together with oily Scotch tape — hang at the end of her nose. The coat she’s wearing is two sizes too big, three sizes, so she’s rolled the sleeves halfway up her arms and she’s using ragged fingernails to pick at an exposed knob of wrist. I’m guessing she’s sixteen years old, give or take a year, and I know she’s coming off a drunk. Either that or a bad high. She’s got sallow skin, half-shut eyes, hunched shoulders — but mostly it’s her smell. When I lowered myself onto the vinyl seat next to her, I got the first whiff, the air around her so pungent it tasted of drugs and booze and smokes and daze. The dried-urine, stale-ashtray stench of a binge.
I turn away and glance around the crowded bus. Is anyone else troubled, disgusted even, by this girl, this child, and her obvious downfall? It’s twilight outside, and the others squeezed in the seats and aisles are only pointed home, lost in themselves, not noticing the girl next to me huddled in her soiled parka tent. But I notice. I take in every detail; I fume over my bad luck at getting stuck next to her. I slide to the far edge of my seat and try not to glance in her direction.
And there, staring out the window across the aisle, I start to wonder about myself. About my suddenly prickled skin and hands knotted in my lap. Why am I revolted by everything about this girl: her puffs of shallow breath, the scab she’s opened on her arm that’s now steak red and glistening, the white crust that formed on her lips while she slept in a train station chair or a building’s frigid alcove? Of course I know why. Of course this stranger has stirred memories of my daughters when they were no more than sixteen and fourteen years old. My own girls, who’d show up at home looking and smelling something like this on the days they bothered to show up at all. The child I’m sitting by has also reminded me of something else I don’t like to think about: the mother I was back then who couldn’t manage the trouble that had landed on my family. It’s been ten years since Amanda and Stephanie stopped going to school, stopped coming home; a whole decade since they joined those on the street who gave them access to beer, dope, tattoo ink, every circus shade of Manic Panic hair dye, metal spikes, and the best corners for getting money from strangers — spanging, they called it. I’ve let myself believe the passage of time and my daughters’ turns for the good have washed me clean of most old aches and pains, but then I get ambushed: by the girl next to me and others like her at bus stops and on street corners and sleeping on benches in the hallways of the university where I work. When I see such kids, when I get up close, I’m inevitably shoved back into my daughters’ old life and into mine, and right up against the question that can’t seem to leave me alone: why?
When my daughters got tired of having their mother search for them on the streets of Eugene, Oregon, and then drag them home again, where we’d scrap and yell and accuse and blame, they jumped a freight train to Portland, two hours straight north up the West Coast. I found out they were in that bigger city a few days after they’d left — friends had spotted them panhandling in the downtown Pioneer Courthouse Square. I drove a hundred miles north to look for Amanda and Stephanie in the nooks and crannies of a strange town; the lack of a single sign of them sent me back home. Years later, the girls told me they’d heard I’d been asking for them, heard I’d stopped at youth shelters and the police station with their photographs. So they’d hopped another train to get farther away, this one to the Tenderloin District in San Francisco, where the drugs were meaner and the cold wind off the bay drove them to accept about any comfort. My daughters had disappeared.
Amanda was gone for three months; I didn’t see Stephanie for a year. For nearly a decade, I thought I wanted to forget everything about that empty expanse of time. But those kinds of memories don’t just get wiped out, they don’t get swept away. Instead, now I find I must wander through the worst of it again — where my daughters went, what they did. How I, every day, handled or failed to handle their absence. I have to face it, although until recently our past has felt too thick, too dense, and, somewhere at its heart, too implicating of me.
I’ve been wary of getting on a bus in Portland, or in any town, and sitting next to a girl like this, with her familiar odor, someone who can yank me backward and who can fill my throat with sour heat before I have a chance to steel myself against memory’s rush. The girl who’s now made me take a look at myself: Where is even the smallest surge of concern for her? Why do I feel more like slapping than hugging her? What’s wrong with me, still, after all this time?
I’d like to be one of those women who can confront the past’s reminders — like this young seatmate — with nothing but compassion. But apparently, I’m not there yet. Something tangled and sore remains unsolved in me. After years of trying to decode and dissect our history, of picking over episodes with my daughters (a fight over a concert, a note found under one of their beds, the nights and nights and nights they didn’t come home), and crawling through the muck again to discover the origins and escalations of our troubles, I want to move on. I want to forgive — Amanda, Stephanie, myself, the times we lived in — so we can stop looking backward.

Now the girl on the bus sits up straighter, pulls a wrinkled plastic bag from between her feet. I’m relieved by these getting-ready-to-disembark moves. She’ll go away and I’ll calm down. I’ll get off near my cozy home with its stocked fridge and good music. Except it’s not going to be that simple; when I stand to let her by, grabbing a silver pole to stay steady, she looks straight at me. "Could you spare a couple dollars?" she asks, pushing the glasses closer to her face. "For something to eat?"
I’m about to say no into her cloud of bitter breath, but my right hand has another idea — it begins reaching for the wallet buried in my purse. And why not? Maybe giving this girl money is a flinch, a gesture in the direction of peace. A reconciliation with the turmoil still inside me. Then I remember how I’ve long railed against those who gave my daughters everything they needed to stay on the streets — blankets, pizza, sandwiches, drugs, alcohol, tampons, medicine, a bed for the night, and money. My daughters stuck their hands out, coins and bills landed in their palms, and that was one more day they didn’t have to come home.
Murky as I am about the giving or not giving, I shake my head in refusal, a nearly invisible movement. With her own small shrug, she clambers off. The bus rumbles ahead again. That’s the end of it, I think, though I can’t help looking out the window, straining to see her one more time. She’s gone. Disappeared that fast. I turn back to press my fingers against a rib that tends to devil ache at moments like this. It’s a pain that reminds me of memory’s snarl and its potency. The pain reminds me, again, how sometimes the past simply refuses to be finished.

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