Hold Me Close, Let Me Go: A Mother, a Daughter, and an Adolescence Survived - Hardcover

An award-winning newspaper columnist provides a candid memoir of dealing with a teenage daughter whose rebellion is spinning out of control as she describes her daughter's transformation from loving child to angry, secretive adolescent involved in drinking, drugs, running away, failing school, and more, in a portrait of motherhood and the healing power of love and family. 30,000 first printing.

mother do when her teenaged daughter is spinning out of control and nothing is bringing her back? Here is a searingly honest memoir of motherhood and a testament to the power of love and family.

When Adair Lara’s daughter Morgan turned thirteen, she was transformed, seemingly overnight, from a sweet, loving child into an angry, secretive teenager who would neither listen nor be disciplined. The author, her youngest son, Patrick, her ex-husband, Jim, and her new husband, Bill, all stepped on a five-year roller-coaster ride in which Morgan incarnated the chaos principle in torn jeans and dyed hair. Drinking, drugging, disappearing, suspicious companions, failing and cheating at school, joy riding in a stolen car–there was no variety of adolescent acting out that she didn’t indulge in. For Adair Lara it became an endless sojourn at the end of her rope, a trial immensely complicated by the reappearance in her life of her aging father, a man who had abandoned his wife and sev