Live through this : a mother's memoir of runaway daughters and reclaimed love

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, 15, 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. 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. Live Through This chronicles Gwartney's frantic efforts to recover the beautiful, intelligent daughters she cherishes. The triumph of her story is its sensitive rendering of how all three women have dug deep for forgiveness and a... 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 togetherto 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. It's a testament to her strengthand to the resilience of her daughtersthat after several years they are a family again, forged by both forgiveness and love. The author describes how she moved across the country in an attempt to build a new life for her four daughters, only to have her two teenage daughters run away, her frantic struggle to find the missing girls, and her efforts to rebuild their relationship Live Through This--as Emotionally Wrenching And Ultimately Redemptive As David Sheff 's Beautiful Boy--follows Gwartney's Frantic Effort To Recover Her Beautiful, Intelligent Daughters From Their Lives On The Street. Debra Gwartney.