The Memory Keeper's Daughter | Kim Edwards

Title: The Memory Keeper's Daughter
Author: Kim Edwards


Well, y'all, this one hit me pretty hard, and I wasn't prepared for it.

I had no idea what this book was about when I picked it up, but I don't think anything could have prepared me for it. It starts out with a young couple, a doctor named David and his wife, Norah, who becomes pregnant. She tells her husband if they have a boy, she wants to name him Paul. If they have a girl, she wants to name her Phoebe. When Norah goes into labor in 1964, they are in the midst of a terrible snowstorm, so David carefully drives his wife to a clinic to give birth. He has to deliver himself. To his utter delight, his wife gives birth to a healthy son. His nurse, Caroline, is keeping Norah drugged, so she's pretty out of it, and surprise! Another baby comes out, a baby girl with obvious signs of Down's Syndrome.

Knowing the chances of Phoebe not having a long life expectancy due to the health risks associated with Down's Syndrome, and haunted by the untimely death of a younger sister who was born with a heart defect, David makes the decision to have Caroline take Phoebe to a home where they care for children with Down's Syndrome. Thinking he is sparing Norah and himself pain in the long run, he tells Norah that Phoebe was stillborn.

In the meantime, Caroline takes the baby to this home, but upon seeing the deplorable conditions, she decides to raise Phoebe herself.

The book centers around the effects of David's lie. Norah, thinking her daughter is dead, retreats into herself, first turning to alcohol, then having affairs, and eventually becoming a travel agent who at that point is basically just roommates with her husband. There is a huge wall between them, and she doesn't know why. They've lost whatever connection they had. David, dealing with his guilt, sends Caroline money to help care for Phoebe, and retreats into a new hobby, photography. This leaves their son, Paul, who is neglected in so many ways, shut out by his mother's grief and his father's guilt.

There is a heart-wrenching scene where, after David's death, Norah is going through some of his photography, and she finds pictures of little girls--babies, toddlers, children, teenagers, young adults, girls in all phases of life. When she realizes that in these photos, David was trying to find something of Phoebe, it completely guts her, as she realizes that he was also grieving all that time and never told her. She, of course, doesn't know the truth at this moment.

The secret eventually comes out, as these things do, and there are, of course, consequences--consequences that David himself does not have to deal with, which is horribly unfair.

If you think I've told you the plot of the whole book, you're wrong. The emotions, the journeys of all the characters--David, Norah, Paul, Caroline, and Phoebe--are so intricate and so beautifully weaved together. I was just truly impressed with this one. I really related to Norah and her struggles after she thought Phoebe had died. I have suffered several pregnancy losses, and I know the isolating grief with which that comes, how one can shut everyone else out and not be able to see past one's own inner distress. But it's not just Norah. Once David's full back story is revealed, it isn't necessarily forgivable what he did, but it almost becomes understandable in a kind of twisted way. I cried pretty hard reading this book.

Five out of five stars.

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QUOTES:
"You can't stop time. You can't capture light. You can only turn your face up and let it rain down."

"A moment might be a thousand different things."

"You missed a lot of heartache, sure. But David, you missed a lot of joy."

"This was her life. Not the life she had once dreamed of, not a life her younger self would ever have imagined or desired, but the life she was living, with all its complexities. This was her life, built with care and attention, and it was good."

"After all these years, I feel so free. Who knows where I might fly?"

"In some deep place in her heart, Caroline had kept alive the silly romantic notion that somehow David Henry had once known her as no one else ever could. But it was not true. He had never even glimpsed her."

"Away from the bright motion of the party, she carried her sadness like a dark stone clenched in her palm."

"On an impulse he went into the room and stood before the window, pushing aside the sheer curtain to watch the snow, now nearly eight inches high on the lampposts and the fences and the roofs. It was the sort of storm that rarely happened in Lexington, and the steady white flakes, the silence, filled him with a sense of excitement and peace. It was a moment when all the disparate shards of his life seemed to knit themselves together, every past sadness and disappointment, every anxious secret and uncertainty hidden now beneath the soft white layers. Tomorrow would be quiet, the world subdued and fragile, until the neighborhood children came out to break the stillness with their tracks and shouts and joy. He remembered such days from his own childhood in the mountains, rare moments of escape when he went into the woods, his breathing amplified and his voice somehow muffled by the heavy snow that bent branches low, drifted over paths. The world, for a few short hours, transformed."

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READING PROGRESS:
No Tomorrow by Luke Jennings: 38%
Rose Madder by Stephen King: 5%
Unspeakable Things by Jess Lourey: 33%
Divan of Shah by Shah Rizvi: NOW STARTING

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