‘Gone’ and Back Northeast Harbor recounts daughter’s torturous journey through drug abuse

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“I take a walk up Schoolhouse Ledge … At the top I do my prayer from the big rock: stand up on it and hold my arms out, looking out over the hillsides of the mountains. The water of the sound. The sky. The last late sun. I go up to the stone porch of the big house and look in the windows the way I like to look in the windows there. I imagine walking through those rooms. I imagine that I could go into those rooms and become another person. My life transformed. But of course, it’s not so.” – Martha Dudman, “Augusta, Gone”

It’s bright and blustery in Northeast Harbor as Martha Dudman walks up the road to Schoolhouse Ledge. Her steps are quick and careful as she navigates the pavement – plowed but slick with ice and scarcely traveled since the summer people departed months ago.

At the end of the road the canopy of evergreens opens up, and Dudman keeps walking into a clearing, tramping through knee-deep snow toward a granite bench. She hops up to get a better view of Somes Sound, then, as quickly as she came, she hops down and turns around. There will be no prayer today. It’s too cold to stay on this wind-whipped hilltop for long.

This time, Dudman isn’t looking into windows, wishing for another person’s life. Today, the walk is just for fun – a diversion from her house and the newspaper interviews and TV cameras that have become a part of her life since Simon & Schuster published her latest book, “Augusta, Gone: A True Story.”

“I’ve been fortunate that people have reacted very favorably to the book,” Dudman said. “Because it’s so honest and because it’s something that most people experience in one way or another, it will appeal to a lot of people and resonate with a lot of people.”

The book is a mother-daughter story of the most unexpected kind. It’s at once harsh and touching, unsentimental and riveting – the kind of book that you read in one sitting. “Augusta, Gone” is the tale of “Augusta’s” downward spiral into drug use, an eating disorder, a quiet suicide attempt. It’s the story of a good mother who can’t figure out what she did wrong or how to make things right.

Dudman doesn’t sugarcoat the truth. She doesn’t depict herself as the perfect mother. Her daughter, whose real name is Georgia Howland, isn’t all sweetness and light either. At times, the story is biting and ugly and raw.

“It’s a naked book I think, but I think that’s important to the story,” Dudman said, sitting in a white rocking chair in the sunny front room of the Northeast Harbor home she shares with her son. “I don’t think you can tell a story fully unless you tell the hard parts. … I cried when I wrote them.”

When it became clear to Dudman that she needed to do something, she and her ex-husband decided to send Georgia to a wilderness program – part detox, part “Survivor,” part boot camp for wayward teens. Her second day there, she slit her wrist.

“And she pulls back her sleeve and then she shows us in one brief flash, before she yanks it down again, two red raised ridges on her arm where she’s cut herself,” Dudman writes in “Augusta, Gone.” “Two long vertical streaks, two angry ridged red lines on her little wrists. On her pale soft skin.”

Even though the book has a happy ending, that part’s still hard for Dudman to take.

“It was awful to remember that,” she said. “My daughter is so terrific. It was awful at that time, but both of us have just grown and changed so much because of what we went through.”

The book opens the door on skeletons that most people would rather leave in the closet. But Dudman is straightforward, as open in person as she is in the book. She doesn’t mince words for fear of how her neighbors might react, even if her portraits of them are less than savory at times. There are no heroes in this book, except maybe Georgia.

“I wasn’t thinking about who was going to read it. I was just writing it to tell it and to make some sense of it for myself and I didn’t hold back,” Dudman said. “There are only a handful of people who I care (about how they react). Who cares about the rest of them? There’s nobody alive that hasn’t been through something.”

Georgia, who’s now 18 and living in San Diego, has taken it all in stride. She doesn’t mind that her life is on display – in fact, she’s pretty happy about it. She’ll appear on “Today” with her mother on March 7, which she’s looking forward to.

“I love the book,” she said in a phone interview. “I’m a star; of course I love the book.”

Over the phone, Georgia sounds happy and light. She just finished a Tae Bo workout, so she’s a little out of breath, but otherwise good. And unlike her younger self, depicted in “Augusta, Gone,” she isn’t angry or swearing or full of teen-age angst.

“I read the book and I start crying because I think, ‘What was I thinking?'” she said. “It makes me so sad to see how horrible I was and to think I could’ve died.”

But when it all started, around the time she turned 15, she wasn’t thinking about how her mother felt or how she was putting herself in danger. She was into drugs. A lot of drugs. She was impatient for life to begin. She was stuck on an island that died in the winter. She was bored.

“There were so many things I wanted to do and life couldn’t live up to my expectations,” she said. “I just basically was frustrated. … It’s because there’s really nothing to do (on Mount Desert Island) and the winters are so long it’s depressing, but it’s such a beautiful place.”

The tranquility that draws adults to the island, or any small-town area of Maine, can drive an adventure-starved teen-ager crazy. Plus, traditional school wasn’t Georgia’s thing, so she eventually stopped going.

After Georgia finished the wilderness program, Dudman enrolled her in a school associated with the program, called Forest Ridge in the book.

Georgia hated it; so much that she ran away – twice. After her best friend at the school killed himself, Georgia came home.

“I think it’s a terrible, horrible place,” she said.

Here, she enrolled at the Community School in Camden, an alternative to the traditional high school experience, where the kids live together, work during the day and take classes at night. There, she found her niche.

“There were so many times I wanted to take off because that was my basic instinct: leave,” she said.

At Camden, they told her that if she wanted to go, she was free to go. She stayed. “Augusta, Gone” ends with Georgia’s graduation.

When Dudman started writing the book, she wasn’t sure how it was going to end. She had recently sold her family’s radio stations, so she didn’t have a day job. Her son was in school. Georgia was in Oregon. Things were quiet in Northeast Harbor. She had time to focus.

“Life was pretty simple,” Dudman said. “I’ve always written all my life, so I thought, ‘I’ll try writing.'”

She started out writing a romantic novel, but 50 pages into it, she realized it wasn’t turning out quite how she had planned.

“It kept going back to my daughter,” she said.

So she scrapped the original plan and started what became “Augusta, Gone.” It was hard, but once she started writing, it just flowed.

“When you write things down, you give them a shape and they start to have a life of their own,” she said. You’re doing something with it instead of having it lie inside of you. … That’s how you do it. To keep something alive, you’ve gotta just tell it.”

It’s a tough story to tell. There were nights Dudman would walk the streets of Northeast Harbor searching for Georgia. There were days when the nicest thing Georgia had to say was “F– you.” It left Dudman grouchy. She didn’t want to see her boyfriend. She bristled around him. She couldn’t tell her parents the whole truth about Georgia. She threw herself into her radio work to get away from life.

“For many people and for me, work is a tremendous relief from life sometimes,” Dudman said. “People knew something was wrong, but they didn’t know how bad it was.”

Regardless of how bad things got, Dudman never thought of letting Georgia go. She couldn’t bear the thought of her daughter wandering the streets at night, looking for shelter or drugs or food.

“You don’t get to give up on your children,” Dudman said. “That never felt like an option to me. There’s a philosophy: kicking your kid out and letting the chips fall as they may. That always felt too dangerous to me.

“If there is a message in the book, it is to never give up on your kid, to hang on.”

While Dudman was hanging on, Georgia was running away, drinking, doing drugs. When she sent her to the wilderness program, Georgia lashed out. She didn’t want to see her parents.

It took a long time, but Georgia came around. She’s talking to her mother again. She’s happy. She’s calmed down a little.

“I’m not a completely straight-edge little angel, but I’m healthy,” Georgia said. “I’m taking care of myself. I’m healthy. I know my limit. I know what not to do. I’m back and I’m good and I’m healthy.”

Now, she’s working as a waitress. She lives with her best friend from Northeast Harbor (Daisy in the book), who stuck by her through it all. She paints, using whatever she can find as a canvas. In the future, she plans to open a gallery in San Diego. For now, she wants to come home for a little while and then take a trip to the Caribbean. Someday, she wants to see her face on the cover of Rolling Stone. She stopped playing the saxophone a few years ago, and she doesn’t sing, but she figures if Sarah Michelle Gellar can get on the cover, she can.

“You’ll see me after this book,” Howland said. “I want to travel. I want to see a lot of things. I want to add my voice to the world. Everyone should give something.”