Live Through This: A Mother’s Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love by Debra Gwartney | Non-Fiction, Family | DONNE TEMPO
Live Through This: A Mother’s Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love by Debra Gwartney
April/09/09 03:41 PM Filed in: Non-Fiction
| Family
By Cecie O’Bryon
England
Two questions sum up this heartbreaking story of a mother’s loss.
What do you do when your life is not what you’d thought it would be?
Where can you turn when your loved ones are running from you?
Author
and mother Debra Gwartney's answer seems to have
been: Shut down, fake it and live in
denial.
Live Through This: A Mother's Memoir of Runaway
Daughters and Reclaimed Love
(Houghton Mifflin; ISBN: 978-0-547-05447-6)
suggests police for hire and tough-love camps.
This could be a primer if the solutions had a more successful trajectory.
Debra Gwartney’s memoir is not for the faint of heart. Live Through This: A Mother’s Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love is a saga of parenting that leads us through Debra’s separation, divorce, loss of daughters, attempts to retain daughters (various facilities, outdoor camps, foster homes) and final tentative relationship with her now adult daughters.
She is the mother of four daughters, the older two of whom lived on the streets during their teen years.
The early nineteen-nineties was a boom time for youth culture in Oregon. The two oldest of Gwartney’s daughters, separated from their father and home in Texas, find a haven there in the Grunge scene of music and freedom, leaving their mother angry, rejected, and hopeless.
Her attempts to maintain a façade of competence lead her to hire outsiders. These private investigators and ex-policemen track and sometimes trap her children. Gwartney’s personal sense of failure is central to this book. She writes of her vision of the “perfect family” and her personal loss as she realizes that it has never been real.
As a mother, the tale is a worst-case scenario nightmare. As a reader, I longed for the true voices of the missing daughters. The emotional quandary of the divorce, the anger of their parents, and the separation from their support system understandably left them adrift.
Debra mentions the joyful bedtime stories her ex-husband told of riding the rails as a young adult. The times when he traveled like the hobos of the 1930’s, experiencing freedom and adventure.
While Gwartney is careful not to place blame in her present day self-awareness her anger clearly remains unresolved. These seeds contributed to the loss of her daughters and the ex-husband was far from involved as their situation deteriorated.
Gwartney, a professor of non-fiction and a reporter has the measured tone of a professional writer, but not the distance. It has taken her eight years to process these personal events and form them into a book.
I imagine Debra Gwartney could be a sensitive and capable teller of tales but her own story leaves too much out- her part of the story is the less dramatic, the story of the one who was left; and her lack of emotional response or empathy, or outreach to the girls, particularly her second daughter, over their many attempted reconciliations limits the readers ability to relate to her.
Who
is
Debra
Gwartney?
Debra Gwartney is the author of the memoir, Live Through This, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in February 2009. Debra is a member of the nonfiction writing faculty at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon, and is co-editor, with Barry Lopez, of Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, published in 2006 by Trinity University Press.
Two questions sum up this heartbreaking story of a mother’s loss.
What do you do when your life is not what you’d thought it would be?
Where can you turn when your loved ones are running from you?
This could be a primer if the solutions had a more successful trajectory.
Debra Gwartney’s memoir is not for the faint of heart. Live Through This: A Mother’s Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love is a saga of parenting that leads us through Debra’s separation, divorce, loss of daughters, attempts to retain daughters (various facilities, outdoor camps, foster homes) and final tentative relationship with her now adult daughters.
She is the mother of four daughters, the older two of whom lived on the streets during their teen years.
The early nineteen-nineties was a boom time for youth culture in Oregon. The two oldest of Gwartney’s daughters, separated from their father and home in Texas, find a haven there in the Grunge scene of music and freedom, leaving their mother angry, rejected, and hopeless.
Her attempts to maintain a façade of competence lead her to hire outsiders. These private investigators and ex-policemen track and sometimes trap her children. Gwartney’s personal sense of failure is central to this book. She writes of her vision of the “perfect family” and her personal loss as she realizes that it has never been real.
As a mother, the tale is a worst-case scenario nightmare. As a reader, I longed for the true voices of the missing daughters. The emotional quandary of the divorce, the anger of their parents, and the separation from their support system understandably left them adrift.
Debra mentions the joyful bedtime stories her ex-husband told of riding the rails as a young adult. The times when he traveled like the hobos of the 1930’s, experiencing freedom and adventure.
While Gwartney is careful not to place blame in her present day self-awareness her anger clearly remains unresolved. These seeds contributed to the loss of her daughters and the ex-husband was far from involved as their situation deteriorated.
Gwartney, a professor of non-fiction and a reporter has the measured tone of a professional writer, but not the distance. It has taken her eight years to process these personal events and form them into a book.
I imagine Debra Gwartney could be a sensitive and capable teller of tales but her own story leaves too much out- her part of the story is the less dramatic, the story of the one who was left; and her lack of emotional response or empathy, or outreach to the girls, particularly her second daughter, over their many attempted reconciliations limits the readers ability to relate to her.
Debra Gwartney is the author of the memoir, Live Through This, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in February 2009. Debra is a member of the nonfiction writing faculty at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon, and is co-editor, with Barry Lopez, of Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, published in 2006 by Trinity University Press.