If you are a parent and you have or are planning to have a teenager, Come Back: A Mother and Daughter's Journey Through Hell and Back by Claire Fontaine and Mia Fontaine is a definite must-read.
Claire Fontaine fought for her daughter Mia when she was abused by her biological father. She overcame overwhelming odds and by the time Mia was a teen, Claire was married to a wonderful man who Mia called "Dad." They lived a relatively privileged life with Mia attending a fine prep school in L.A. If I was Claire, I would feel a huge sense of relief at having weathered the horrifying storm of child abuse, divorce and striving to provide a normal life for my daughter. I would never suspect what Claire had to endure...finding that Mia had run away and had been using drugs and cutting herself for months.
The book is written from the alternating perspectives of Claire and Mia. At first I found myself over-thinking MIa's entries and saying to myself, "Oh sure. Like she would really say this." Claire's entries seem to be written in retrospect, while Mia's seem to be written in the moment. It's not necessarily a case of verb tense, but an overall feeling in their individual writings. Finally I decided that my over-thinking was keeping me from immersing myself in the story. I resolved to myself that Mia was writing in retrospect as though she was now in the moment. If this makes sense to anyone, please let me know.
Claire rescues and Mia escapes a couple of times before taking drastic measures unavailable to her in the U.S. and placing her in an intense, highly regimented and controversial program for troubled youth in the Czech Republic. Claire writes of the agony and self-doubt that she went through as she tried to bring her little girl back from drug-strewn streets peopled with addicts, criminals and neo-Nazis. Mia writes gut-wrenchingly of her hatred for her mother, the lure of self-destruction and her eventual rehabilitation.
As a parent, I nodded knowingly at Claire's observation when interacting with other adults who knew of her situation. "I know they all care, many of them deeply, and I'm grateful. It's the pity in their eyes I can't stand. How careful they are. It's such a thin line between I'm sorry it's you and I'm glad it's not me." This line is a stab of reality as you try to read this reassuring yourself that, "this couldn't happen to MY kid!"
In the role of mother, Claire reaches for whatever solutions there are. If her child suffered from a fatal disease, we would applaud her efforts to obtain whatever experimental therapies were available. She forces us to understand that grasping at whatever therapies are available in order to not lose her child to violence or drugs is a reasonable plan of action. "I don't care if they use shamans and chants. I hope they bring in a Feng Shui master to rearrange her mental furniture, locate the seat of trauma, and reposition it to deflect the poison arrows Mia keeps aiming at herself."
She chose a place that would, "isolate, modify, confront, reveal, redirect! They'll do whatever it was that I couldn't do to help her." Coming to the realization that it is not always YOU who knows best for your child flies in the face of everything we read about, worry about and discuss from conception on. But sometimes it is the only solution.
Even if your child does not indulge in the dangerous behaviors that led to Claire and Mia's odyssey, you will see the universal themes of teenage rebellion and rejection of parents throughout their story. If you have a teenager, Come Back will most assuredly ring true on some level and will relate to your own struggles whether they involve drug use, keeping a messy room or being disrespectful.
The only thing that jumps out at me because that's who I am is the shoddy editing. Maybe no one else cares. Maybe it shouldn't reflect poorly on a book, but this book is in at least its second printing since I was reading the paperback version, aren't these errors atrocious?
"The manual tells parents not to focus on points...but I ride her's like a roller coaster."
"Whose gonna care here?"
The second one, it could be argued, which was written by Mia could have been a natural error that was preserved. However, her segments are quite well-written and she is clearly a gifted writer. So I wouldn't buy that argument. Does anyone else share my feeling that publishers should care about these kinds of details? And that by not being precise about editing, they are perpetuating the decline of acceptable grammar?
I loved that Claire loves Anne Lamott. If I knew Claire and her struggles, Anne Lamott is exactly who I would have suggested she read. Claire blogs at www.Clairedujour.com. I haven't visited yet, but I plan to.
Wonderful book....read it.
Di
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