Live Through This

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 Thischronicles 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 return to profound love.

DEBRA GWARTNEY is a former Oregonian newspaper reporter, and worked as a correspondent for Newsweek magazine for ten years. She is on the nonfiction writing faculty at Portland State University. Her 2002 appearance with daughters Stephanie and Amanda on This American Life garnered intense listener response. The mother of four daughters and married to the writer Barry Lopez, Gwartney lives in Eugene, Oregon.