Have You Found Her: A Memoir
Feb 2008 · Sold by Villard
4.8star
6 reviews
Ebook
368
Pages
family_home
Eligible
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About this ebook
And every week, there was the unspoken question, the one I didn’t know enough to ask myself : Have you found her yet? The one who reminds you of you?
Twenty years after she lived at a homeless shelter for teens, Janice Erlbaum went back to volunteer. Now thirty-four years old and a successful writer, she’d changed her life for the better; now she wanted to help someone else–someone like the girl she’d once been.
Then she met Sam. A brilliant nineteen-year-old junkie savant, the product of a horrifically abusive home, Sam had been surviving alone on the streets since she was twelve and was now struggling for sobriety against the adverse health effects of long-term drug abuse.
Soon Janice found herself caring deeply for Sam, following her through detoxes and psych wards, halfway houses and hospitals, becoming ever more manically driven to save her from the sickness and sadness leftover from Sam’s terrible past. But just as Janice was on the verge of becoming the girl’s legal guardian, she made a shocking discovery: Sam was sicker than anyone knew, in ways nobody could have imagined.
Written with startling candor and immediacy, Have You Found Her is the story of one woman’s quest to save a girl’s life–and the hard truths she learns about herself along the way.
“A rich and compelling account . . . Ultimately this is a book about the narrator’s journey and the dangers that attend the urge within us all to believe we can save another soul. A terrific read.”
–Cammie McGovern, author of Eye Contact
Twenty years after she lived at a homeless shelter for teens, Janice Erlbaum went back to volunteer. Now thirty-four years old and a successful writer, she’d changed her life for the better; now she wanted to help someone else–someone like the girl she’d once been.
Then she met Sam. A brilliant nineteen-year-old junkie savant, the product of a horrifically abusive home, Sam had been surviving alone on the streets since she was twelve and was now struggling for sobriety against the adverse health effects of long-term drug abuse.
Soon Janice found herself caring deeply for Sam, following her through detoxes and psych wards, halfway houses and hospitals, becoming ever more manically driven to save her from the sickness and sadness leftover from Sam’s terrible past. But just as Janice was on the verge of becoming the girl’s legal guardian, she made a shocking discovery: Sam was sicker than anyone knew, in ways nobody could have imagined.
Written with startling candor and immediacy, Have You Found Her is the story of one woman’s quest to save a girl’s life–and the hard truths she learns about herself along the way.
“A rich and compelling account . . . Ultimately this is a book about the narrator’s journey and the dangers that attend the urge within us all to believe we can save another soul. A terrific read.”
–Cammie McGovern, author of Eye Contact
Ratings and reviews
4.8
6 reviews
A Google user
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February 10, 2008
I hardly know where to begin. I held my breath through the entire last half of the book. I am not sure if I was holding it for Janice, or for Sam. This is the most emotionally provoking book I have read in a very long time. It reads like a novel, but it is all too real. Each page is filled with compassion, yearning and vulnerability. The author is brutally honest about herself and her feelings, her motives. To say that I could not put this book down is an understatement. Even now, when I have come to the end of the book, I know that it is not a true ending. How can it be? I think I will always wonder what has become of Sam. Will she always be hovering on the edges of the lives of women who cared enough to bring her into their lives, and truly care for and about her? How many more will there be? I have been angry with Sam, and felt compassion for her. I have mentally raged at Janice, and wondered why she could not see! And I have understood how she could be drawn in. Most of us want to do good things. We want to be helpful. I feel so much a part of what happened here, due to the remarkable storytelling abilities of this author. Before the end of the day I will have ordered her previous book, Girlbomb from Amazon. I urge everyone to read this book, in order to be reassured that there are still more good people than bad surrounding us. There is love and selflessness., kindness and generosity. There is hope for us, due to the kindness of strangers.
Camille Harris
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August 13, 2022
Great way to pass time
A Cat
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February 28, 2019
Awesome.
About the author
Janice Erlbaum is the author of Girlbomb: A Halfway Homeless Memoir and Have You Found Her, which was named one of the New York Public Library's 25 Books to Remember. A former columnist for BUST magazine, she lives in New York City with her partner Bill Scurry. You can find her at www.girlbomb.com
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