Augusta, Gone
by Martha Tod Dudman
My daughter left three days ago.
‘I’m not telling you where I am,’ she says when she finally calls. ‘Don’t try to find me.’
So begins Martha Tod Dudman’s book, Augusta, Gone, the story of her daughter’s troubled adolescence. Dudman, a single mother, raised her son & daughter in a small town on the coast of Maine, where she thought she was giving them a pretty good childhood, but at 11 or 12, her daughter, Augusta, began getting in trouble. Just little things at first -- she was in trouble at school, she was lying, she was smoking. But by the time she was fifteen she was totally out of control. By then she was into drugs and alcohol, disappearing for days at a time, stealing, cutting herself -- she had dropped out of school.
Augusta, Gone follows Dudman’s search for help for her daughter, which included stints in a rugged wilderness program, a treatment center in Oregon, and a nerve-wracking period when her daughter was missing altogether. Finally, Augusta returned to Maine, where she enrolled at the Community School and found the support and encouragement she needed to earn her high school diploma.
Parents who have lived through similar situations with their teenage children will appreciate the honesty with which Dudman explores her feelings of love, guilt, anger, despair, and hope.
