Hold Me Close, Let Me Go

A mother, a daughter, and an adolescence survived.

When Adair Lara's daughter Morgan turned thirteen, she was transformed 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, began a five-year roller-coaster ride with Morgan.

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 seven children decades earlier.

Inevitably, Morgan's misbehaviour revives memories of her own headstrong adolescence, while her father's presence makes agonisingly real for her the consequences of giving up. Paradoxically, he also becomes the source of her best advice.

'Hold Me Close, Let Me Go' is an emotionally charged, often brutally honest memoir that will deliver shocks of recognition to all parents. It imparts invaluable lessons about holding loved ones close through the roughest passages and about the power of family to overcome the most grievous obstacles.