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 together-to 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 painful-and universal-journey 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 return to profound love. AUTHOR: Debra Gwartney is a former Oregonian newspaper reporter and worked as a correspondent for Newsweek magazine for ten years. She teaches writing at Portland State University. Gwartney is the mother of four daughters and is married to writer Barry Lopez.
