Terry: My Daughter's Life-And-Death Struggle With Alcoholism
- Book Review,
by George McGovern
Amazon.com
George McGovern, the 1972 Democratic nominee for President, offers a tragic family drama while confronting the choices of his own life in this story of a daughter's fatal fight with alcoholism. Told in direct prose, the tale is a harrowing one. Teresa Jane McGovern, the middle child of five, began drinking at age 13, was hospitalized for depression after her arrest for smoking pot at age 19, cleaned up for a while in her 30s, but then spiraled out of control until she froze to death in a parking lot after a drinking binge. Her father openly examines his role and the causes of his daughter's demise.
From Publishers Weekly
The former Democratic senator from South Dakota here presents a memorial service for his alcoholic daughter, Terry, who froze to death on the streets of Madison, Wisc., one pre-Christmas night in 1994. Other such books have been more felicitously written but few as heart-wrenchingly, as we hear about Terry's troubled life from her family (three sisters and a brother who is a recovering alcoholic), friends, doctors and police. The onetime presidential candidate's daughter began drinking at 13; at 15 she had an abortion, arranged by her father although the procedure was then illegal. Terry, who continued drinking, was arrested for possessing pot in 1968, a charge carrying a mandatory five-year sentence she beat (thanks to her father's lawyers) on a technicality involving the search warrant. She left college to spend more than four years in daily psychoanalysis following six months in a locked psychiatric ward. Although as one doctor noted, Terry was "an awfully tough case," in 1980, when she was 31, her life seemed salvageable; at that time she embarked on what proved to be eight years of sobriety, during which she and her lover had two daughters. But her drinking, despite countless treatment programs, at private facilities and AA, would ultimately kill her. Her father, who discusses the high incidence of alcoholism among his forbears and has now dedicated himself to the cause, considers Terry's a possible genetic condition. His anguish is potent. Author tour. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From School Library Journal
YA?Terry McGovern was found frozen to death in a snow bank in Madison, WI, just before Christmas in 1994. She died not because she was unloved or unsupported, but because she was unable to stop drinking. The author, a former senator and one-time candidate for president, wonders whether he could have loved his middle child more or shown greater support during her 20- year battle with the bottle. He searches through the journals she kept for most of her adult life; speaks with friends, counselors, and other alcoholics; consults with members of his family; and tries to understand where they all went wrong. The result is a heartrending, painful account of the day-to-day, year-to-year struggle Terry faced in dealing with her "demon," and the conclusion that this disease is unremittingly unyielding to logic or love. The book reveals much about both alcoholism and the family dynamics so often associated with the time and energy put into "curing" the alcoholic. So many people are directly and indirectly affected by the disease that any open discussion of its cause and treatment is valuable, and the story of its impact on this high-profile and basically good family shows the democratic nature of its incidence.?Susan H. Woodcock, Kings Park Library, Burke, VACopyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
On December 12, 1994, Terry McGovern was found dead in the snow after having passed out in an alcoholic stupor. Former Senator George McGovern here traces his daughter's almost lifelong addiction to alcohol and pieces together the events of her last few days on earth. While his phrasing is sometimes trite or even a bit sensationalistic, it's always obvious that McGovern is trying desperately to find out and share the truth about his daughter and her alcoholism. He talks about mistakes he made in dealing with Terry and pleads with others who live with alcoholics not to repeat his errors. He takes the issue further by discussing alcoholism as a disease that can be blamed on an inborn tendency physically to need alcohol. Even if the author were not well known, this book would be worthwhile for all public libraries because of the truths it reveals to friends and families of those addicted to alcohol.?Pamela A. Matthews, Missouri Western State Coll., St. JosephCopyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The New York Times Book Review
A father's painful, cathartic reminiscence.
From Booklist
In December 1994, Madison, Wisconsin, police found the body of 45-year-old Teresa McGovern--middle child of former presidential candidate and South Dakota senator McGovern and his wife, Eleanor--in the snow. Terry's death devastated her family, but it was not entirely shocking, for she had struggled with alcohol for 25 years. Like her brother Steve, a recovering alcoholic, Terry had inherited vulnerability to alcohol from her father's family and depression from her mother's. She experimented with alcohol from age 13 (and used pot and LSD during high school) and was first hospitalized for treatment before she turned 20. Sober through most of her 30s, Terry fell in love and gave birth to two daughters she cherished, but the old demons returned: her daughters went to live with their father, and Terry spent her last year shifting in and out of detox programs. AA's 12-step approach certainly helped Terry, but McGovern regrets the distance he and Eleanor kept, on the advice of professionals ("Don't enable" ), in Terry's final months, insisting that "there is no such thing as too much compassion, understanding, support and love for the sick and dying. Alcoholics are sick unto death. They won't make it through the night without our love and protection--and sometimes our repeated direct intervention." Drawing on diaries and family members' comments as well as his own memories, McGovern's Terry is a moving portrait of a troubled woman and a compelling exploration of a disease that affects 20 million U.S. families. Mary Carroll
From Kirkus Reviews
An anguished account of the unhappy life of Terry McGovern, by a father still struggling to come to terms with it. Former senator McGovern learned in December 1994 that his 45-year-old daughter had frozen to death in a snowbank in Madison, Wisc., after a night of heavy drinking. The present work is his attempt to understand and to explain to himself and the world how this came to be. Terry, the middle of the McGoverns' five children, struggled with alcoholism and depression most of her life. Her adolescent years read like a parent's nightmare: an abortion, drugs, a suicide attempt, and an arrest for marijuana possession that threatened to send her to prison for five years and to end her father's political career. Both were averted, but soon afterward Terry was in the locked ward of a psychiatric center, where she was being treated for depression. McGovern includes excerpts from journals Terry kept over the years that reveal her drinking habits and her troubled state of mind. Except for an eight-year period of sobriety in her 30s, when she gave birth to two daughters, Terry's life is a saga of treatment programs, hospitalizations, and rehab centers--all invariably followed by relapses. McGovern quotes from stark police and detox center reports to depict Terry's degradation in her final months. This is not pretty stuff. Throughout, Terry is portrayed as the beleaguered victim, struggling against the double blow that fate has dealt her: a genetic vulnerability to alcohol addiction from her father's side of the family tree and to depression from her mother's. Although McGovern the politician cannot resist the occasional self-serving paragraph, and McGovern the parent tries too hard to convince us of his daughter's spirituality and nobility of character, his basic message that alcoholism and mental illness create a vicious circle of misery comes through loud and clear. (8 pages of b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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