Mia Fontaine

Claire and Mia Fontaine's dual memoir Comeback is about teenage daughter Mia's brush with street life and drug addiction, and mother Claire's efforts to save her. Claire has runaway Mia kidnapped and sends her to an unorthodox rehab facility in the Czech Republic, where an intensely structured, almost cult like program helps Mia deal with her long-buried issues, including her sexual abuse at the hands of her biological father. Claire, too, undergoes transformation as she attends therapeutic workshops and examines her own role in bringing about Mia's rebellious behavior. By the end, the memoir gets bogged down in therapy-speak, but, all in all, this is a moving look at the lengths a mother will go to in order to bring her daughter back from the brink of self-destruction.

Shortly before I finished this book and wrote the paragraph above, I did a bit of research into the Czech program Mia was in. Turns out it was part of the WWASP family of therapeutic "boarding schools", most of which were shut down in the 1990s and early 2000s due to allegations of child torture and abuse. The memoir's timeline is vague, but Wikipedia states that the Mia's program, "Morava", opened and was shut down in 1998. Nonetheless, Claire and Mia seem happy with the program's results. Now that I know about the controversies surrounding the program, Mia and Claire's story seems more like a defense of the WWASP "tough love" approach than anything else. Read with caution.… (altro)