About this item
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.
About the Author
Debra Gwartney is the author of LIVE THROUGH THIS: a Mother's Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2009, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. LIVE THROUGH THIS was also named one of the top ten books of 2009 by The Oregonian and by the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association, was a national finalist for the Books for A Better Life Award, and was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award.
Debra and her husband Barry Lopez are co-editors of HOME GROUND: Language for an American Landscape, published by Trinity University Press in 2006.
They live in Western Oregon.
