Augusta, Gone - by Martha Tod Dudman (Paperback)

About the Book

"Augusta, Gone" is the true story of a 15-year-old girl who is doing everything to hurt herself and a mother who would try anything to save her. Dudman shares the tumultuous years of her daughter's adolescence and her own inability to heal her teenager's wounds, let alone exert control.

From the Back Cover

The story of a girl who is doing everything to hurt herself and a mother who would try anything to try to save her.

True, she had stopped coming down for breakfast. Stayed up in her room, ran out the door late for school, missed the bus and had to have a ride. But you think, well, that's how they are, aren't they, teenagers? And you try to remember how you were, but you were different and the times were different and it was so long ago. And she's suddenly so angry at you, but then, another time, she's just the same. She's just your little girl. You sit with her and you talk about something, or you go shopping for school clothes and everything seems all right. And you forget how you stood in her room and how the center of your stomach felt so cold. When you found the cigarette. When you found the blue pipe. When you found the little bag she said was aspirin.

Review Quotes

"Dudman's writing is brutally honest and painfully immediate...." - San Francisco Chronicle
"Dudman's fluid, simple prose makes this memoir, with its difficult subject matter, an easy, compelling read." - Book Magazine
"Dudman's writing is brutally honest and painfully immediate." - San Francisco Chronicle
"Painful close-up of a horrible time, this memoir is still a story of salvation." - U.S. News & World Report
"This manic, wrenching memoir is a staggeringly honest and compelling portrayal of the highs and hells of motherhood." - Glamour
"Short of classic war accounts, I have not read a more honest memoir than Augusta Gone...if you read nothing else this year, read (and believe) Augusta, Gone." - New York Law Journal