Augusta, Gone: A True Story [VINTAGE 2001] [FIRST EDITION, FIRST PRINTING]

As new condition dark gray boards, black spine and gold spine lettering contained in an as new condition non price-clipped photographic dust jacket. Includes Author Note; Prologue; Epilogue and Acknowledgments. "Augusta, Gone is a story about wild things and where they go. Imagine an understated story about the most overwrought horror, and about a love so big that it is stifled by its own force. This book alarmed and devastated me, it made me laugh and made me wonder - and it told me why and how. So entirely unexpected, Augusta, Gone may be mistaken for a mother-daughter story. But it is really about life and how it happens, how, in all its devastation, it just keeps happening: like mother, like daughter, like hell." - Elizabeth Wurtzel, author of Prozac Nation and Bitch. "Augusta, Gone is a book long overdue, the most moving, honest memoir to come along in a very long time. I cried when I read this book, for all the misunderstood parents and their lost children." - Molly Jong-Fast, author of Normal Girl. "Martha Tod Dudman reveals one of life's best-kept secrets: no one can rip out your heart like your own child. Augusta, Gone is a shock and a wonder, a two-ton truck on a mountain road without brakes, a tough, poignant tale of the revenge of the life cycle, in its ironic glory." - Karen Karbo, author. "Augusta, Gone is a devastating, powerful, frightening, lovely book that explores the enormous and mysterious bond between mothers and daughters. When I finished reading this book, I did two things: I called my own mother and then I hugged my own daughter, hard, both in the hopes of holding on to that elusive something that keeps us together, and that always threatens to drive us apart." - Ann Hood, author. " I thought I'd heard everything about the anxiety, guilt, weariness, vulnerability and love that go with the territory of motherhood. But no one - and I mean no one - tells the story as truly as Martha Tod Dudman. Augusta, Gone is like a powerful spike that pierces the hypocrisy and sentimentality of all the myths that surround motherhood. This courageous book takes us to the heart of life itself, which does not go as we expect or plan." - Harriet Lerner, Ph.D, author of The Dance of Anger. " "I'm not telling you where I am. Don't try to find me." Remember Go Ask Alice? Augusta, Gone is the memoir Alice's mother never wrote. A single parent, Martha Tod Dudman is sure she is giving her two children the perfect life, sheltering them from the wild tumult of her own youth. But when Augusta turns fifteen, things start to happen: first the cigarette, then the blue pipe and the little bag Augusta says is aspirin. Just talking to her is like sticking your hand in the garbage disposal. Martha doesn't know if she's confronting adolescent behaviour, craziness, her own failures as a parent - or all three. Augusta, Gone is the story of a girl who is doing everything to hurt herself and a mother who would try anything to save her. It is a sorrowful tale, but not a tragic one. Though the book charts a harrowing course through the troubled waters of adolescence, hope - that mother and daughter will be reunited, will learn to love each other again - steers them toward a shore of forgiveness and redemption. Written with darkly seductive grace, Augusta, Gone conjures the dangerous thrill of being drawn into the heart of a whirling vortex. This daring book will be admired for its lyricism, applauded for its courage, and remembered for its power. It demands to be read from start to finish, in one breathless sitting." - from the inner front and rear jacket flaps. …