Augusta, Gone

Elizabeth Wurtzel author of Prozac Nation and Bitch Augusta, Gone is entirely unexpected. It is a story about wild things and where they go. Martha Tod Dudman's writing is a shock -- so amazing, so simple, so precise, so correct. Imagine an understated story about the most overwrought horror, and about a love so big that it is stifled by its own force. This book alarmed and devastated me, it made me laugh and made me wonder -- and it told me why and how. Augusta, Gone may be mistaken for a mother-daughter story, a coolly sentimental tale of love and reconciliation between generations. But it is really about life and how it happens, how, in all its devastation, it just keeps happening: like mother, like daughter, like hell.

Molly Jong-Fast author of Normal Girl Augusta, Gone is a book long overdue, the most moving, honest memoir to come along in a very long time. I cried when I read this book, for all the misunderstood parents and their lost children.

Karen Karbo author of Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me Martha Tod Dudman reveals one of life's best-kept secrets: no one can rip out your heart like your own child. Augusta, Gone is a shock and a wonder, a two-ton truck on a mountain road without brakes, a tough, poignant tale of the revenge of the life cycle, in its ironic glory.

Ann Hood author of Ruby and Do Not Go Gentle Augusta, Gone is a devastating, powerful, frightening, lovely book that explores the enormous and mysterious bond between mothers and daughters. When I finished reading this book, I did two things: I called my own mother and then I hugged my own daughter, hard, both in the hopes of holding on to that elusive something that keeps us together, and that always threatens to drive us apart.

Harriet Lerner, Ph.D author of The Dance of Anger I thought I'd heard everything about the anxiety, guilt, weariness, vulnerability and love that go with the territory of motherhood. But no one -- and I mean no one -- tells the story as truly as Martha Tod Dudman. Augusta, Gone is like a powerful spike that pierces the hypocrisy and sentimentality of all the myths that surround motherhood. This courageous book takes us to the heart of life itself, which does not go as we expect or plan.