"HOLD ME CLOSE, LET ME GO"
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Review by Carol Felsenthal, Chicago Tribune
Review by Debbe Geiger, Newsday
Review by Diane Sawyer
Review by Jacqueline Mitchard, Author
Martha Tod Dudman and Adair Lara live on opposite coasts--Dudman
raised her daughter in Northeast Harbor, Maine, and Lara raised hers in San
Francisco--but they tell a strikingly similar story of a daughter's teen years
gone horribly wrong. Drinking, drug taking, drug selling, running away, shoplifting,
sexual recklessness and violent tantrums made each girl a danger to herself
and her family.
Both mothers are 49 and have a son younger by a year than the daughter. Each
divorced when her children were young, had a troubled relationship with her
own mother and a wild, '60s-style adolescence. Neither was discreet about
sharing the details of the latter with her daughter, who was treated with
the easy familiarity of a friend.
"Augusta, Gone" is the more disturbing of the books, in part because
Dudman's daughter, actively suicidal, seems even more troubled than Lara's.
Also, Dudman's style, although sometimes irritatingly nursery-rhyme-like in
its staccato, repetitive sentence structure, is brutally intense, a relentless,
unadorned catalog of over-the-top rebellion.
Dudman married Ben--a sweet, ineffectual man who stays involved with his children
in bad times as well as good--who suited her when she was a hippie but whose
lack of ambition bred in her increasing contempt. When asked why they divorced,
she thinks to herself that the real question is why would anyone stay married.
She congratulates herself on giving Augusta (not her real name) and Jack the
"perfect childhood" in Maine: sledding, swimming, hiking, stories
read aloud, cozy private times with mom. While she worries that she screamed
too much about infractions that didn't matter, that she worked too much (she
trades her bellbottoms for business suits as she takes over her family's radio
stations) and that her juggling act too often had balls flying every which
way, generally she rates herself a great mother. She believes that her honesty
with Augusta has been a virtue; Augusta knows that her mother smoked pot,
got expelled from her fancy private school, sneaked out of her parents' house
to have sex with her boyfriend and hated school--"Dumb classes about
dumb things taught by dumb people." Dudman all too successfully passes
on that attitude to her daughter.
Other mothers with whom Dudman once discussed homework and curfews avert their
gazes when they see her. These women "with their smug problems and their
rolling eyes" don't want their teenagers hanging around with Augusta,
who, when she does show up at school, is stoned on drugs and selling them
to boot. She goes to parties and returns days later, famished and exhausted.
After a long nap, she appears in the kitchen to threaten her mother with a
knife. One night, at a loss for anything else to do, Dudman calls the police
on her daughter. Leaving on a business trip one morning, Dudman tells Augusta:
" "Good-bye honey. I love you." " The reply: " 'I
hate you! . . . I hope your plane crashes!' "
Out of alternatives, she and Ben send Augusta to what has become the next-to-last
resort for upscale, out-of-control adolescents: a wilderness program in Idaho,
where, Dudman writes, "they yell in your face and put you on the desert
with a stick." From there Augusta is transferred to a school in Oregon.
"We are all so sad about our children," Dudman writes of a parents'
visiting time, "that here, among the other failure parents, there are
no comparisons about whose kid is worse. . . . It's sweetly noncompetitive."
Augusta shuns her parents except to show them the red welts under her shirtsleeves--the
results of her slitting her arms.
Augusta's brother, Jack, loves his sister, but he fears her, and he fears
his mother's nonstop tears. "He doesn't want to come into my room,"
Dudman writes, describing Jack standing in the door of her bedroom. "I
can see why. It's full of too much emotion. 'Think about something good,'
he tells me kindly."
Augusta twice runs away from the school in Oregon. It's not working, and she
comes home. And then she calms down. Why? Who knows? It's as if Augusta outgrew
the rebellion. She finishes high school at a special school. At book's end
she is 18, working in a restaurant, saving money to go to California and,
presumably, to college, best friends with her beleaguered mom who seems content
to accept the delightful new Augusta and not ask or answer too many questions.
For Adair Lara, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, life felt lovely.
She had a new and adored husband, Bill, a book editor who had many virtues,
among them a love for cleaning house. They lived in the bottom part of a Victorian
owned by her former husband, Jim, the father of her children, Morgan and Patrick,
who floated between floors. Jim, with whom all remained on amiable terms,
loved to cook and bake. It seemed so civilized.
Then Morgan turned 13.
"Hold Me Close, Let Me Go" is a more-conventional memoir, replete
with characters and digressions. Lara's own unsettled adolescence--sex in
her teens, marriage when she was a senior in high school--is prominent, as
is the sudden appearance in the book of her alcoholic, narcissistic father,
who, when Lara was 10, abandoned his wife and seven kids without a penny or
a look back.
"I had started out as a buddy mom and evolved painfully into a more parental
one," Lara writes, "but I had never found my balance." The
decisions she is forced to make are "not parenting by the book"
but "triage. It was keeping [Morgan] alive until the right sort of help
could be found."
Morgan uses LSD, marijuana, methamphetamines. She gets drunk before a school
dance and pushes a girl. " 'Morgan is predictable,' " one teacher
complains. " 'I can predict she will be late, she will be unprepared,
she will disrupt the class, she will try to cheat.' " She joyrides with
a group of friends in a stolen car with brakes that fail. They continue coasting
downhill until they crash As Lara drives Morgan home from the police station,
she thinks that "it was Morgan herself who had no brakes. I could not
trust her to keep herself out of danger."
Relatives with whom Morgan is sent to live give up on her. She stays in crummy
rented rooms and apartments, switching schools, cutting so much she has, in
effect, quit. When Lara finally urges Morgan to return home, she says she'll
do so only if her boyfriend, Zack, a druggie and dropout, can sleep over.
That first night--a school night, but that hardly matters anymore--Lara and
Bill are kept awake by the sounds of Morgan and Zack's lovemaking. She ends
up pregnant, resisting her mother's pleas to have an abortion.
By book's end, Lara has blamed her divorce, when Morgan was 5, for her subsequent
problems. Bill, who arrives on the scene when Morgan is 12 and marries her
mother the next year, can't stand the mess that Morgan makes of their lives,
shaking her furiously one night and screaming at her. He gathers her shoes,
her clothes and her books, throws them on her bed and shuts the door, as if
he can shut her out of their lives. " 'It just feels sometimes as if
you had to choose him or me, and you chose him,' " Morgan says at one
point.
" 'I hate Morgan,' " Patrick cries. " 'I don't want her for
a sister anymore.' " He resents her stealing all the attention, all the
opportunities for normal teenage rebellion. As he and his father and mother
go to pick up Morgan from the house of her uncle who has thrown her out, he
complains:
" 'Other people get to take trips. . . . We just get in Dad's car and
drive Morgan's things around the landscape.' "
Like Augusta, Morgan, sent to an alternative school to finish high school,
seemed simply to snap out of it. She recently graduated from the University
of California at Santa Cruz.
If any of the daughters (and several sons) who pay tribute to their mothers
and grandmothers in "Pirkei Imahot" rebelled, they don't remember
it in this lovely collection of essays and poems published by the Jewish Reconstructionist
Congregation in Evanston--intended, its editors explain, to provide a female
counterpart to pirkei avot, the "portion of the Talmud [that] offers
us [the] beliefs and values" of the fathers. Here are one woman's memories
of making gefilte fish with her mother-in-law; another woman's joy in recognizing
the "undeniable likeness" between her and her mother. Here are memories
of a mother so conditioned by early struggles that she tears napkins in half,
"no matter how small they start out"; and memories of a widowed
mother who spends time with a man whose wife recently died. "But Mr.
Colen's idea of a day out was taking her to the cemetery so they could visit
their dead spouses. This made for a peculiar double date." Now 78, she
announces she's looking for a younger man.
For all the vulgarities they hurled at their mothers, one can imagine Augusta
and Morgan one day writing tributes to them. And that is the beauty of the
relationship explored in these books. The years bring perspective and even
gratitude for a job almost never done perfectly, but often done with enormous
heart.
~Carol Felsenthal, Chicago Tribune, April 15, 2001.
Carol Felsenthal is a Chicago writer of books, including four biographies,
and magazine articles.
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WHAT'S a parent to do when his or her loving child turns
into a rebellious,
secretive teenager? "Hold Me Close" tells the true story of Adair
Lara, a San Francisco Chronicle columnist, and her daughter Morgan, who at
age 13 turned to smoking, drinking and drug abuse. Every transgression was
met with fights and aggression between parent and child. Morgan constantly
threatened to drop out of school and run away. The book begins as Lara, at
her wit's end, finally decides to throw her daughter out of her house. At
the same time, Lara's own aging, alcoholic father comes back into her life.
"Hold Me Close" is a painfully honest memoir of Morgan's wild ride
through
her teenage years and Lara's struggle to hold on. It also tells the story
of
Lara's difficult upbringing as one of seven children abandoned by their father.
While she tries to get through to her daughter, she also tries to rebuild
a relationship with her father.
Lara turned to self-help books for guidance, but found her solace in writing.
She provides what most parenting books don't. They offer advice and support.
She gives you the emotions of a mom living through one of the most difficult
times of her life. She describes the frustration and anger of trying to communicate
with someone you love dearly but who won't let you in. Her story becomes particularly
poignant as mother and daughter overcome their hardships and become friends.
~Debbe Geiger, Newsday, October 9, 2001
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"This is a wonderful book."
~ Diane Sawyer, Good Morning America
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"The thrilling level of honesty and discovery
burned into every line of Hold Me Close, Let Me Go is something that rarely
informs a memoir of any kind. In this case, Adair Lara has transcended the
genre of self to achieve selflessness. Her story of her struggle, the mistakes,
the triumphs, the abiding love and pure anguish to save her brilliant and
self-destructive daughter is a must read for anyone who loves a child, or
ever hopes to love a child. Not every child will follow Morgan's stormy passage
to redemption, but many will, and for any parent, Lara's book will be a beacon."
~Jacqueline Mitchard, author of The Deep End of the Ocean and The
Most Wanted
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