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Debra Gwartney details her efforts to recover her runaway daughters, who at the ages of fifteen and thirteen left home together as a reaction to Debra's divorce from her husband and move to Eugene, Oregon.

When living with her mother, an alcoholic ex-beauty queen, becomes unbearable, almost seventeen-year-old Maybelline "Maybe" Chestnut runs away to California, where she finds work on a taco truck and tries to track down her birth father.

Narrated from both the mother's and daughter's perspective, a memoir that describes the life of a teenage runaway, her mother's determination to find her, and the daughter's struggle to overcome self-hatred and depression.

Martha Tod Dudman discusses how she dealt with her daughter's drug addiction.