"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 behavior, 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 and will learn to love one another 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.
Industry Reviews
Elizabeth Wurtzel author of Prozac Nation and Bitch Augusta, Gone is entirely unexpected. It is a story about wild things and where they go. Martha Tod Dudman's writing is a shock -- so amazing, so simple, so precise, so correct. 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. Augusta, Gone may be mistaken for a mother-daughter story, a coolly sentimental tale of love and reconciliation between generations. 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.
