Amazon.com Review
"Thanks for a wonderful childhood!" Stephen Digges tells his mother as he hugs her goodbye in front of his New York City college dorm, and it's a measure of just how persuasive and potent her account of his difficult adolescence is that we know exactly what he means. At 13, Stephen was running away, stealing his mother's car, carrying guns, doing drugs, and getting into trouble with the law and in school. Already divorced from Stephen's father, Digges saw her son's problems break up her second marriage and heard society, her family, and her neighbors tell her she was too easy on her son, that fatherless boys needed "tough love" and discipline. But Digges had the courage to listen to a highly unconventional therapist who urged her, "Join him in his anger at life.... Don't educate him about what he should have done. Let him figure it out." Together with Digges's foster son (an African American teen thrown out of his home after a stint in juvenile detention), they create a bohemian household. Three dogs (one of them epileptic) "sleep on the beds no questions asked"; Stephen does his homework with a pet mouse named Frederick in his pocket; there are swarms of kittens "leaping in and out of the windows"; and the pizza delivery for dinner may be interrupted by "phone calls from teachers, more often the cops." Go figure: creative, anti-authoritarian Stephen acquires a sense of responsibility and ambition in this offbeat atmosphere. His mother's surprisingly funny, unsentimentally tender memoir reminds us that there are no rules about raising children, just countless perils and boundless possibilities. --Wendy Smith
From
At 14, Stephen was stealing cars, waving guns around his house, and running with a violent gang. But his mother, poet and memoirist Deborah Digges, did not give up on Stephen. Instead, she took extraordinary steps to save him. She "shadowed" him, disguising herself and following Stephen's nighttime escapades. She invited gang members into her home, where they smoked and played loud rap music. Enduring the disapproval of neighbors and friends, the breakup of her second marriage, and many late nights, Digges refused to abandon her son. Eventually, with the help of an unconventional therapist and the family's large assortment of pets, Deborah and Stephen grew back together, sharing a level of intimacy that is sure to be the envy of her disapproving neighbors. This is not a book of advice, and Digges doesn't offer easy answers or suggest her parenting strategy to others. Instead, it is a wrenching memoir about the things that mothers and children will do to, and for, one another, written with a poet's eye for resonant images. John Green
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