Act One

The chronicle of a family that unravelled. Debra Gwartney loved her two oldest daughters like she loved herself. And they loved her in return. But Debra got a divorce, moved the family to Oregon, and relations with her daughters got worse and worse. Finally, at the ages of thirteen and fourteen, they ran away. In this story, Debra and her daughters try and retrace what exactly went wrong. The story was produced by Sandy Tolan of Homelands Productions, in collaboration with Debra Gwartney and her daughters. It's part of the World Views series of first person narratives, which gets funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Debra wrote a book about what happened in their family called Live Through This: A Mother's Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love. (35 minutes)