The Stardust Lounge: Stories from a Boy's Adolescence

Stephen Digges is out of control by the time he is thirteen -- running with gangs, stealing cars, fooling around with drugs and guns, and in general making his family's life hell. Confronted with his growing recklessness and defiance, his mother, the poet Deborah Digges, decides to accept Stephen on his own terms -- a course that stuns her family. She welcomes Stephen's friends to their apartment, fills their home with a menagerie of ailing or abandoned pets, and turns to an unconventional therapist. Digges stubbornly refuses to give up on her son; and it's impossible not to root for this family as it rebuilds itself.