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Live Through This: A Harrowing Journey |
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| by Therresa Kennedy Book Reviewed: Live Through This: A Mother’s Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love By Debra Gwartney, 2009 Moving, insightful and socially relevant memoir writing is a difficult endeavor and a monumental challenge for any writer to take on successfully. Few writers are able to write memoirs that do not naturally become compromised by the many pitfalls of this dangerous territory of the confessional and often indulgent personal narrative. Debra Gwartney’s book “Live Through This: A Mother’s Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love” (2009) appears to be one of those memoirs that does not succeed on the simple levels that a good memoir should. Perhaps this book should be re-titled “A Mother’s Guide On What Not to Do to Your Teen Daughters.” It is definitely a compelling read and from a morbid standpoint, it’s interesting to note the manner that Gwartney goes from one bad self-sabotaging situation to the next with a chilling determination and tenacity toward failure. A manner of determination that confuses and confounds, as in why would someone do that? Where is the empathy for her daughter’s feelings? Where the common sense? Where the kindly maternal instinct to protect, encourage or support the fragile egos of her young daughters? There are many aspects to the book that do indeed confuse, such as the several mechanical errors that this reviewer noticed. The numerous awkward word combinations that simply don’t work; one in the very first paragraph of the book in fact. There are also habitual run on sentences that become muddied, confused and overly wordy that will clearly be noticed by others. These mechanical problems make the book a sometimes choppy read with little flow or natural grace. The stories generally go forward in a positive chronological direction, though there are some unexpected flash backs that rather interfere with the flow of information given. Other than a few benign stories of her husband Tom’s antics, getting drunk and urinating into a water storage facility as a college student, being “irresponsible” with few serious details to back that accusation up and other indicators of Gwartney’s growing boredom with her husband, (sexual?) or the manner that he has become “irrelevant” to her, there seems little concrete or valid reason why this woman would so suddenly abandon her husband taking her four young daughters from the only stability or apparent happiness they have ever known. Her husband Tom does not appear to have been unfaithful, nor does he appear to have verbally abused her, emotionally abused her or for that matter physically battered her. He is clearly not some big bad wolf from which she must rescue her children or herself. In fact, he seems sympathetic and likable to the extreme during the entire book; an obviously playful character that appears extremely important, and rightly so, to the two oldest daughters Amanda and Stephanie, as a source of support that is consistently denigrated by their mother as being “childish-irresponsible-dangerous-a risk taker” etc. He is given no credit anywhere in the book for anything, only the unfair and unrealistic assignment of blame. These things, inconsistent and unbalanced as they are do not constitute a completely bad memoir though, because memoir should and does generally involve a process by which mistakes are made, revealed and examined, at which point insight is the expected outcome. What makes this particular memoir difficult to enjoy is the relentless manner in which Gwartney demonstrates so little emotional empathy for others and the apparent lack of any manner of personal insight into her huge personal failings toward her children, as well as her husband Tom-who clearly deserved a See Book Review on page 20 Continued from page 19 warmer and more responsive partner. Each person with whom Gwartney has contact, even those who go out of their way to assist and help her are routinely described in only negative terms that often border on the comically satiric. When the book begins, in the prologue, Gwartney cannot summon any manner of human compassion or kindness but rather feels disgusted and repulsed by a homeless teen girl who is high, smelly, ill and alone on a Portland bus. She asks herself, “where is even the smallest surge of concern for her? Why do I feel more like slapping than hugging her? What’s wrong with me after all this time?” She goes on to write, “Something tangled and sore remains unsolved in me” (page 3) When the girl asks for spare change Gwartney naturally refuses, given her apparent emotional and/or spiritual miserliness. This seems to be the constant pattern of the book, a refusal to connect with others on any charitable level and a constant fear of the unknown or what could be considered different, socially unacceptable, or looked upon with dis-favor by the conforming majority of mediocre adults. The man who pulls Gwartney out of an overturned car after a serous car accident (and may well have saved her life) is described insultingly as “bare-chested- huge-muscled” with “inky tattoos” on his arms. At no time does she thank him or anyone else for helping her. The police officer from L.A. who helps her find her runaway daughters is described in equally unforgiving and unfair terms, “I noticed then how his ears stuck out from the sides of his head. His neck was too thick to let him button the top of his shirt. Behind him, through his trucks windshield, I saw an air freshener hanging from his review mirror in the shape of a naked woman, her bare breasts in a high salute” (75). The caring professionals and others who appear to genuinely want to offer the best help they can to Gwartney’s two runaway daughters Amanda and Stephanie, are either too fat, too thin, stupid, overly religious or have ugly hair or offensive smelling breath; with stinky breath appearing as a recurring theme to the sensitive olfactory senses of the delicate Gwartney. The woman with whom her ex-husband remarries, Ellen, is described in what can only be an insulting fashion designed to make it appear Gwartney is paying her a compliment when in reality Gwartney is describing her in a way that no woman would appreciate or welcome. “Ellen’s cantaloupe breasts bounced under her skimpy tank top, her peasant skirt flowing from generous hips. I had on a pair of cords, a long sleeved T-shirt, sandals, my usual get-up. No matter how I tried to talk myself out of it, Ellen made me feel like a pencil shaped little kid” (41) This passage seems a compliment to Ellen, but is not. No woman wants to be described as wearing “skimpy” clothes or to have “cantaloupe breasts” or least of all, “generous hips.” In comparison Gwartney is thinner and a “pencil shaped little kid.” In today’s image obsessed, thin obsessed and weight conscious world, the comparison is comical, not very imaginative and also painfully transparent. A compliment wrapped inside a blatant insult and not too hard to figure out in terms of adolescent motive and immature one-upmanship. Gwartney insults all the people who come to her aid, (other than her mother or other family members) and this aspect of the memoir is relentless and consistently offensive. It smacks of a cold elitism that is not hard to notice and exceedingly difficult to stomach. Yes, Gwartney talks about how she misses her daughters, about how she has so obviously made huge mistakes, about how they run off and embrace a self destructive life of self mutilation, drug use, promiscuous sex, filthy living and homelessness. Yes she asks many questions, such as why did it happen, why is she so rigid, why do her daughters dread being around her, why did it happen to her. Sadly, none of these questions are answered. At any time during the memoir. At no time, does she offer or achieve any manner of insight for the reader to digest, which is the biggest reason she remains so consistently unsympathetic. To someone who has not read the book, you may think, “wow, this is the story of a great mom, who really loved her kids and just had a lot of bad luck” but that’s not the real story from beginning, middle to end. For this particular reviewer, what struck me the most was that by the time I had finished reading the book, I had not connected with the protagonist Debra Gwartney in any way, for the simple reason that she seemed too much of a control freak, too rigid emotionally, too fearful, too vindictive, too full of hate, anger, jealousy, resentment, and too cut off and unable to connect in any human manner with real people who deserve respect and compassion. When she wrote at one passage in the book, “I turned around and glared at Ricky because I could” this being an isolated teenaged homeless girl, her daughters had befriended, while Gwartney was in her middle thirties and a mother, I knew that at no time could I relate to this woman in any way. She was hollow; a hollow human being I could never admire, respect or desire to emulate in any fashion. It seemed to me, by the end of the book and from Gwartney’s own simplistic unadorned prose that every accusation made by her two older daughters had essentially been explained to me. No amount of focusing on how clean Gwartney kept her house or the cookies or cinnamon rolls she baked, or the homework she attended to for her kids, or the long hours she worked, or the lessons or activities she arranged for them could alter the fact that she was emotionally cut off from her daughters and completely unable to express genuine love in a relaxed, playful or mature manner. The book is not an enjoyable read. It’s dismal and depressing. It’s a how to manual on what TO do to alienate your daughters and make them flee and flee and flee and flee. It’s a warning to all loving mothers on the importance of allowing our daughters some measure of control, of not stifling or suffocating them by micro-managing every aspect of their lives and then wondering why they can’t stand to be around us. It’s a warning on the importance of not vilifying fathers, on not using children as emotional tampons to be discarded when they are no longer deemed useful or making children pick sides and of destroying father/daughter relationships with that toxic and ultimately selfish self serving dynamic. The book is important for many reasons and there are some moments in it that are genuinely moving if only because they illustrate the daughters self destructive tendencies and despair so clearly, but it is not, at any stage an inspirational book, nor does it have the language of an elegant writer with a facility for poetic description or psychological insight into the fallibility of the human condition or the potential largeness or charitableness of the human heart. At best Gwartney is passable as a writer. Read it and prepare to thank your lucky stars your mother wasn’t like this mother. I know I did. Therresa Kennedy is an Alliance Volunteer
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