Book Review: ‘The Memory Keeper’s Daughter’

The Memory Keeper's Daughter
By Kim Edwards
Penguin Books, 2005

In an intriguing twist on the typical adoption-related plot line, Kim Edwards weaves an engrossing story that reveals the damage secrets and lies can wreak on a family.

The story opens in 1964, as Norah Henry goes into hard labor during the middle of a snowstorm in Lexington, Kentucky. Unable to make it to the hospital in time, Norah’s orthopedic surgeon husband, David, delivers the baby, with assistance from his nurse, Caroline.

Heavily sedated during the delivery, Norah doesn’t realize that she gives birth to twins. The first is a healthy boy. The second is a tiny girl whom David immediately realizes has Down syndrome.

In a moment of horrified panic that haunts him for the rest of his life, David instructs his nurse, Caroline, to take the baby to “a home.”

“This poor child will most likely have a serious heart defect. A fatal one. I’m trying to spare us all a terrible grief,” he tells his nurse. He decides to tell Norah that the baby died.

Unable to leave the baby in the home for retarded children, Caroline decides to informally “adopt” her and raise her as her own.

The book follows the two families through 1989, focusing mostly on the very thing David had hoped to avoid: his wife’s “terrible grief” over “losing” their daughter, Phoebe.

Norah, wallowing in unceasing pain over her supposedly dead baby, engages in various self-destructive behaviors. David, guilt-ridden over lying to his wife but determined to keep his secret at all costs, withdraws into a silent shell and views life from behind the lens of his camera. Their son Paul, the unwitting victim of his parents’ angst, rages at both his parents.

Meanwhile, Caroline and the other twin, Phoebe, establish their own lives in a distant locale.

While eloquently written, The Memory Keeper's Daughter jumps from scenario to scenario, giving us random glimpses into the lives of the various characters. The slow-paced narrative, while thought-provoking, regularly rehashes the same material; I felt as if I was watching an endless film loop replay itself in my mind. Especially disappointing was the fact that the author killed off one of the main characters near the end of the novel. Was this her way of neatly tying up plot twists she was unable to resolve any other way, I wonder?

The story helped me better understand the grief that birth parents experience when placing a child for adoption, as well as the insecurities that adoptive parents in a closed adoption feel. But overall, the narrative offered little hope; little forgiveness; little redemption. And while the ending was hopeful, it left me feeling unsatisfied and just plain sad.

Readers, if you’ve read The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, what did you think? Please post a comment.

Comments

[Becky B]

Exactly what I felt when I was finished - if only the couple had felt they could be honest with each other - how sad!! It did leave me feeling hopeless -

[Darci]

Hey a friend gave me this book a few months ago - I'll have to pull it off the book shelf and read it.