Come Back Claire Fontaine & Mia Fontaine
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Come Back: A Mother and Daughter's Journey Through Hell and Back
Claire Fontaine & Mia Fontaine
ReganBooks
Hardcover
320 pages
April 2006
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In a world where there is an ever growing number of memoirs exploding onto the market, be it the solemn, emotional, profound kind (McCourt’s Teacher Man or Didion’s Year Of Magical Thinking) or even the in-your-face, controversial kind (Frey’s Million Little Pieces), there always seems to be room for more of the unflinching rawness of memoirs like Comeback: A Mother And Daughters Journey Through Hell And Back. Come Back runs the gamut from brutally honest and shocking to funny and heartwarming. Here, in the opening chapter, Claire Fontaine is taking her daughter to a drug treatment and rehabilitation center in Eastern Europe.
“Mia will be locked up. She is broken now. Thin, pink scars beribbon her thighs and stomach, her ankles are bruised by a felon’s leg shackles, her wrists by handcuffs. She is medically malnourished and made up like a whore. Inside, she is dark and damaged and gone. I don’t know when I’ll see her again, my one true child. My desperate hope is that she can be repaired, even badly patched. Mostly, though, I simply hope they can keep her. That she does not escape, as she has done again and again and again and again. Each time to do worse things with worse people, criminals finally. The only thing left would be death, hers or someone else’s.”
The prose is very vivid and bleak as the book tells of Mia’s drug use, self-mutilation, and sexual abuse from her biological father. Interspersed between the mother, Claire’s, vibrant narrative are daughter Mia’s diary entries, which give you a look into how desperate things had become for her. Mia is sent to the Morava Academy in the Czech Republic, while Claire and her husband Paul go to therapy to get rid their guilt. In the end, Mia finds herself in Spring Creek Lodge in Montana and the tenuous relationship between mother and daughter comes full circle from troubled to complete.
Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book at www.curledup.com. © Bobby Blades, 2006
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