Kim Edwards's novel resonates with a wide range of readers because its description of the emotions that accompany loss are so intensely real. The genesis of this story, according to Edwards, was a chance encounter she had with one of the pastors at her church. After Edwards had published her first short story collection to critical acclaim, the pastor approached her a few times with the promise of a compelling story. When Edwards finally decided to listen to it, she learned that the pastor had known a man who discovered late in life that he had had a brother with Down syndrome, who was put in an institution and died there. “I was immediately struck by the idea of the secret at the center of this family,” Edwards writes on her website. “I made a note of the story, but it wasn't until a few years later, when I did a workshop with a group of adults who have mental disabilities, that I seriously began to consider writing this book. I had a wonderful day with that group; they made a deep impression on me.” Readers unaware of the truth behind this novel have appreciated its depiction of profound loss and the pain caused by secrecy and deception.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Kim Edwards was born in Killeen, Texas, on May 24, 1958. Her childhood memories, however, come from experiences with her family in

Skaneateles, New York, where she grew up as the oldest of four children. After attending Auburn Community College, she received her bachelor's degree from Colgate University in 1981. She then earned her master of fine arts at the University of Iowa in 1983, and a master's degree in linguistics in 1987. She married Thomas Clayton that year, with whom she would have two daughters. After graduation, she and her husband traveled to Asia, where they taught for five years in Malaysia, Japan, and Cambodia. During this time, Edwards began to publish short fiction. Her early work proved to be promising. She published in such prominent journals as Ploughshares, Story, and The Paris Review, and she won a Pushcart Prize for the short story “The Way It Felt to Be Falling.” Her short story collection The Secrets of a Fire King (1997) earned her a spot as a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award in 1998. After having taught creative writing at Warren Wilson College and Washington University, she is now an assistant professor at the University of Kentucky.

The Memory Keeper's Daughter became a New York Times bestseller and won both the Barnes and Noble Discovery Award and the Kentucky Literary Award for 2005. Right after publication, it was praised in the Chicago Tribune as an “extraordinary debut,” and “a heart-wrenching book, by turns light and dark, literary and suspenseful” in the Library Journal. Of her own creative process, Edwards says on her website, “Writing is always a process of discovery—I never know how the story will unfold until I write it—and one of the pleasures of writing The Memory Keeper's Daughter was finding the strength and resilience that emerged in these characters in the face of difficult circumstances they did not completely understand.” Her short story collection The Secrets of a Fire King was reissued in 2007.

PLOT SUMMARY

1964

The Memory Keeper's Daughter opens in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1964, and introduces David Henry, a successful physician who appears to have an enviable life. He enjoys a successful private practice and is married to a beautiful woman with whom he is very much in love, and who is expecting their first child. She goes into labor during a blizzard. The hazardous driving conditions prevent the obstetrician from meeting them and force David and Norah to have the baby delivered at his clinic rather than a hospital. With the assistance of a nurse named Caroline, David delivers the healthy baby boy himself. They name the boy Paul. David is shocked to find, however, that Norah is actually carrying twins. As soon as the second baby—Phoebe—is delivered, David discovers she has Down syndrome. His discovery conjures memories of his sickly sister, June, whose early death traumatized his childhood and haunted his family. Wanting to avoid the same fate for his own family, David decides to send the daughter, under Caroline's care, to an institution for those diagnosed with her condition. Unaware of the devastating consequences this act will inflict on his family, David tells Norah her second child is stillborn.

Following David's instructions, Caroline takes Phoebe to the institution. Horrified by the pervasive loneliness and sense of abandonment at the institution, Caroline decides to keep the baby and raise her herself. Driving back into Lexington the next night, she stops at a grocery store, aware that the baby has become very hungry. She has just enough time to buy milk for the newborn before the store closes, and when she returns to her car, she realizes she has left her lights on, and her car battery is dead. Panicked, she cries out for help. Her cry is answered by a truck driver named Al, who offers her and Phoebe warmth in the cab of his truck. He takes them home to safety, spends the night, and leaves the next morning. When Caroline learns of the memorial service Norah has planned for Phoebe, she meets with David one last time to implore him to reconsider his decision and tell his wife the truth. David refuses, and after watching the funeral service at a distance, Caroline decides to disappear, honoring David's wishes.

1965

David, acutely aware of the lies he has told his family and everyone around him, is consumed with a guilt that prevents him from connecting with either his wife or his son. Norah cannot overcome the grief she experiences at the loss of her daughter and reads her husband's distant and aloof demeanor as disinterest in her.

Meanwhile, Caroline finds employment with Dorothy March as a nurse to Dorothy's father Leo, an aging retired physics professor. In return for her service, Dorothy offers Caroline and Phoebe room and board. In spite of the old professor's difficult personality, Caroline finds peace and true friendship in the house. Once, while taking out the trash, she is approached by a stranger who turns out to be Al, the friendly truck driver who saved her and Phoebe on that snowy winter night. Al has found her after months of searching, and they begin a relationship that slowly grows very strong. He becomes a nurturing and dependable father figure to Phoebe, and Caroline eventually falls in love with him.

1970

Norah encounters her sister Bree at a peace rally on the college campus and bristles at the thought that her sister's criticism of her as a homemaker is true. She throws a birthday party for Paul, now aged six. During the party, the tension between her desire to entertain guests and enjoy the moment and David's obsession with capturing the event in still images threaten the mood of the party. They experience a fleeting moment of laughter that quickly disappears when Paul, who has joked that he needs help getting down from a tree he has climbed, actually falls and fractures his arm. Caroline discovers Phoebe's allergy to bees when she is stung by one, and she and Al rush to the hospital. In contrast to the fractured relationship David and Norah cannot seem to repair, exacerbated by Paul's accident, Caroline and Al's relationship solidifies during their trip to the hospital, where Caroline agrees to marry Al.

1977

David, Norah, and Paul find outlets for their guilt, grief, and insecurity but remain detached from each other even as the emotions they originally feel individually begin to intertwine in a swirl of indecipherable angst. David becomes obsessed with the hobby his wife inadvertently encourages—photography—when she gives him a camera aptly named The Memory Keeper on their first anniversary. Rather than facing his dishonesty and betrayal, he devotes all of his energy to developing his craft, often retreating to a darkroom he has set up above the garage. While the family is on a beach vacation, Norah satisfies her cravings for intimacy through her first affair with a stranger named Howard. Paul becomes increasingly disturbed by the loveless relationship between his parents and begins to internalize the stress of their confused conflict. Through his music, he seeks solace from this conflict, as well as from his grief over the thought that he has been allowed to live, while his sister has died.

Over the years, David receives letters from Caroline about Phoebe, and he sends Caroline money via the various post office boxes around the country that she provides to him. She is able to avoid him by having Al pick up the correspondence during his frequent deliveries as a truck driver. Norah is disillusioned by what she sees as David's avoidance of her. In her loneliness, she seeks comfort in her work as a travel agent. Paul, who begins to find his identity in the music he plays as he develops his skill with the guitar, is inversely inspired by his father's discouragement of his hobby. He interprets David's encouragement for him to pursue what he thinks is a more serious and solid field than that of music as disapproval. Once again, David's good intention—and protectiveness—for his son turns into disaster. The more he pushes Paul, the more Paul rebels and feels unloved. Paul's existence as an innocent victim to his parents' failures is much more tragic than his sister's life as a child with Down syndrome. While Paul's tragic life as the son of a guilty father and a grieving mother overcomes him, Phoebe thrives as the daughter of Caroline and Al. Dorothy announces to Caroline that she has fallen in love with Trace, her companion, and she gives her the deed to the house. They all enjoy a celebration of Phoebe's confirmation, Caroline's fifth wedding anniversary, and Dorothy's retirement.

1982

David's talent earns him photography shows and once, while presenting his work at a museum in Pittsburgh, he is approached by Caroline, who confesses she had loved him once, and who confronts him about his lack of interest in her and Phoebe. When he is called back to mingle with his patrons, he loses Caroline in the crowd. Tormented by the memories she conjures for him, he revisits his family home, which is now abandoned, and falls asleep. He wakes to find himself tied down, held captive by a pregnant fifteen-year-old named Rosemary who is clearly a runaway. Exhausted physically, but more exhausted mentally, David pours out the details of his dark secret about Phoebe and the fact that no one in his life knows about her. Both wanting to protect Rosemary from a life of starvation and desperation, and wanting someone in his life to know the truth, David returns to his home with the pregnant girl. Rosemary's presence confuses Norah and Paul for obvious reasons, but softens David, who seems to be a step closer to telling them the truth. When Paul tells David he has been accepted at Julliard, David congratulates him in a shocking expression of approval. Overcome by the drastic change in his father, Paul runs away. Norah and her sister Bree retrieve Paul, but David retreats, unable to divulge his secret, unable to connect at all with the family from whom he has estranged himself with his dishonesty and overwhelming fear.

1988

David has moved out of his home to live in a duplex and spends much of his time caring for Rosemary and her son Jack, who is now five. He remembers visiting Caroline and Phoebe in Pittsburgh—without their knowledge—when Jack was born and watching them move across their windows from his car in the street below. Rosemary tries in vain to convince David to tell Norah and Paul the truth, but he refuses. Paul has become a successful musician and keeps in touch with his father, calling and visiting from time to time between gigs on the road. After divorcing David, Norah has fallen in love with a French man named Frederic. She talks to Paul often but to David infrequently.

When Rosemary leaves with her son to move back home, David decides to revisit the house where he and Norah raised Paul. He struggles with his desire to tell Norah and Paul about Phoebe, but finds himself unable to do so. Soon after, David unexpectedly dies of a massive heart attack. Norah, who is in Paris with Bree meeting Paul and Frederic, braces herself to tell Paul the shocking news. Paul is stunned and grief-stricken. His father was someone he felt he never knew, but his emotions are strong nevertheless. He introduces his mother to his girlfriend Michelle, and Norah meets up with Frederic. Phoebe thinks she is in love with a man named Robert, who also has Down syndrome. Caroline is concerned that they do not know what they are doing, and that they will end up with a child she will have to raise. She is relieved, though, that Robert's relationship with Phoebe seems stable, and that he seems like a safe companion.

1989

Caroline Gill returns to Lexington to tell Norah the truth about Phoebe. In a rush of rage that comes only after Caroline leaves, Norah dumps David's collection of photos out the window and sets them on fire. Paul has an argument with Michelle, who does not want to live a traditional life and does not want children. He drives back to Lexington to meet his mother, intending to help her pack her things in preparation for moving to France. When he arrives, Norah tells him his sister is alive. Together, Norah and Paul visit Caroline and meet Phoebe at last. The novel ends with the wedding of Norah to Frederic and the scene of Paul and Phoebe visiting their father's grave.

CHARACTERS

Bree Asher

At the beginning of The Memory Keeper's Daughter, Norah's sister Bree lives out her liberal philosophy daily by abandoning tradition and rebelling against conservative social norms. By the time she was a junior in high school, Bree had eloped with a pharmacist who lived in the neighborhood, and then when the marriage failed, she divorced him. To the young mother Norah, Bree seems carefree and happy, and is occasionally the object of her envy. Eventually, though, Bree reveals her unhappiness to her sister. They remain close all their lives, and they end up intimately relating to each other later in life.

Mark Bell

Mark Bell is Bree's boyfriend, who has fought in Vietnam, and whom Norah meets at a peace rally at the university. He attends Paul's sixth birthday party at the Henrys' home.

Carl

Carl attends the meeting with Caroline, Sandra, Ron, and Coleen as an advocate for better education for children with Down syndrome. His son had died from heart complications related to Down syndrome, and he is devoted to helping others who have this condition. He loans his office to those who work for this cause.

Coleen

Coleen is a friend of Caroline's who also has a daughter with Down syndrome. She and her daughter gather names for a petition for better education for the disabled.

Frederic

Frederic is the French man with whom Norah falls in love after divorcing David. A Canadian from Quebec who works with her at IBM, Frederic is romantic and loving towards her. He is a fitting companion for a woman who has suffered greatly from her husband's dishonesty and the belief that her daughter has died.

Caroline Gill

Caroline Gill is the thirty-one-year-old nurse who is present at the birth of the Henrys' twins. After the traumatic delivery, David asks Caroline to take his newborn daughter Phoebe to an institution for children with Down syndrome. Caroline grows to love Phoebe and, longing to raise her as her own daughter, avoids David when he eventually seeks her out. She had been in love with David before he met Norah, and thought he returned her feelings, though she had no concrete evidence for this. She eventually finds relative stability with Al, a loving husband and a supportive father to Phoebe.

David Henry

David Henry is a doctor who, when his wife Norah gives birth to twins, decides to give up his disabled newborn daughter to avoid the mental anguish that he fears the family will experience in having a handicapped child. David is haunted by memories of his sister June, who suffered from a heart defect, and died at the age of twelve. He fears that if he keeps his daughter, whom he discovers at birth to have Down syndrome, she will cause his family the same kind of intense grief. What he does not realize is that he will cause more severe suffering for his family in making this choice than he experienced in his own early life. He immerses himself in his hobby of photography after Norah gives him a camera for an anniversary gift, and he becomes quite successful. He is eventually invited to display his work in museums, and wins awards. He is also a dedicated doctor who works long daytime shifts and devotes evening hours to seeing patients who cannot afford health care. His benevolence and preoccupation with photography increase as he tries to repress the reality of the choice he has made to erase his daughter from the lives of his wife and son.

Norah Henry

Norah is David's wife, who experiences unbearable sorrow over what she believes is the death of her daughter. Norah tries desperately to overcome her grief at first, and then after unsuccessful attempts to connect with her inscrutable husband, she is forced to cope with her sadness and loneliness in other ways. In her early years, she is naturally conservative, believing that all she wants is to marry happily and have children. But after losing her daughter and feeling alienated by her husband's erratic and emotionally distant behavior, she seeks employment and spends more and more time at work in order to escape the difficulty of home life.

Paul Henry

The son of David and Norah, Paul is haunted by thoughts of his sister, whom he believes died during childbirth. He grows up with the knowledge that something profound is missing in his parents' relationship, and is angered by his father's dictatorial attempts to decide his future for him. Paul finds a way to channel his anger and sadness in playing the guitar, at which he is quite talented. He is distraught by his father's disapproval of his intention to pursue music as a career. At the same time, however, he is driven by his father's disparagement, in that he wants to prove him wrong. In spite of his father's pessimism, Paul eventually perseveres as a musician, touring successfully around the world.

Phoebe Henry

Phoebe is the daughter of the Henrys who is born with Down syndrome and given up by David. Nevertheless, Phoebe grows up in a happy, healthy, and stable home with Caroline Gill. Phoebe faces many challenges as a child with a disorder no one in her generation truly understands, but with the help of her mother, who is determined to dispel stereotypes and change expectations for children with Down syndrome, she flourishes.

Howard

Howard is a stranger Norah, David, and Paul meet while on vacation at the beach, and is also the first man with whom Norah has an affair. Howard seems fascinated by David's photography at first, but he is really interested in Norah. As Norah discovers during one of her visits to his hut, he has a loving wife and children who have no idea of his infidelity.

Duke Madison

Friends with Paul during his teenage years, Duke comes from a large working-class family that seems happier and more connected than his, even though they are similarly torn by damaging secrets and betrayal. Unlike David, Duke's father is always accessible and actively involved in his children's lives, returning home from work punctually each day, in hopes of spending time with them.

Dorothy March

Daughter of the physics professor Leo March, Dorothy hires Caroline to be her father's caretaker and becomes her friend as well. She has a doctorate in physics and works in the university physics department her father had formerly chaired.

Leo March

Leo is the retired physics professor for whom Caroline is hired to provide care. Leo has a difficult time accepting help from others and often takes his frustration out on Caroline. Though he was once a brilliant chair of the physics department and a loving and kind father, his personality has changed, and he suffers from frequent memory lapses and at times does not make sense.

Kay Marshall

Kay is one of the mothers in Norah's circle of friends. She is the kind of mother Norah always believed she would be. Her children are perfectly dressed and well behaved, and she has a calm demeanor in dealing with them. She is from a wealthy, old-fashioned family and is a member of the upper crust of Lexington society. When she attends Paul's sixth birthday party, David recalls that she once kissed him after drinking too much at a party. She reminds David of Norah in the loneliness she tries to hide.

Michelle

Michelle is the musician with whom Paul falls in love while he is in Paris. Michelle is more ambitious than Paul and is disinterested in living a conventional life. The thought of having children is foreign to her, as she wants to devote her time to becoming a successful professional musician.

Robert

Robert is the man with whom Phoebe thinks she is in love. He is a member of the Upside Down Society, a group of people with Down syndrome who are taught how to be functional members of society. Caroline is concerned that he and Phoebe will begin a family without knowing what that really means, leaving her responsible for any children they would have. She instructs them to plan carefully and keeps a watchful eye on Robert.

Rosemary

Rosemary is the pregnant teenager living in David's old abandoned home. She is four months pregnant when David encounters her. Besides Caroline, Rosemary is the only other person David tells about his decision to give up his daughter. She is very close in age to Phoebe, and David's desire to save her from her life as a single mother living in poverty is partly a result of his philanthropic nature, and partly an attempt to compensate for his tragic decision to abandon his own daughter. Rosemary lives platonically with David after he divorces Norah, until her son Jack is five years old.

Sandra

Sandra is a woman Caroline befriends in the library and whose son has Down syndrome as well. Phoebe and Sandra's son, Tim, become good friends and playmates, and the two women become allies in the battle for social acceptance of those with Down syndrome.

Albert Simpson

Albert Simpson is the truck driver who rescues Caroline Gill and the newborn Phoebe from the cold abandoned parking lot in which he finds them. Though Caroline knows nothing of him when they meet, he turns out to be honorable, kind, and dependable. His obligations as a truck driver put a mild strain on his relationship with Caroline, but he never fails to be consistent and loving towards her and Phoebe.

Ron Stone

Ron is the lawyer for Caroline, Sandra, and other parents of children with Down syndrome. He helps them fight for a better education for their children.

THEMES

Memory

The first word in the title carries special meaning for each of the characters and is, throughout the novel, almost a character itself. To have memories of things is necessary; to allow them to control all of your future actions and strip you of free will is tragic. The most literal memory keeper, David, makes his pivotal decision to send Phoebe off because he is plagued by the sorrowful memories of his sister June's poor health and early death. When he sees that his newborn girl has Down syndrome, he recalls that “all his mother's attention had gone to [June], and yet she had died when she was twelve years old…he remembered the depth and endurance of his mother's grief, the way she walked uphill to the grave every morning, her arms folded against whatever weather she encountered.” Instead of interpreting the birth of this child as a new experience, David allows the memory of his sister to define the present circumstances and to control his actions.

As the novel progresses, we learn that David is skilled at repressing memories of the past. In a flashback, David remembers that when he received the letter that announced his acceptance to college, for example, he chose not to correct the mistake made on the letter, the omission of his real last name, McCallister. This choice to leave behind his surname and his identity leads him to renounce his past and foreshadows his attempts to erase the unpleasant memories of his life. But repressing some of his memories forces him to do whatever he can to capture other memories, which is why he immerses himself in collecting images through photography.

If memory must be allowed, cherished, and overcome, the other memory keeper—the camera given to David—plays a significant role in helping or hindering the process of doing each of these things. The camera can capture what David avoids—the hard, solid truth of things. He tries to dispose of the first pictures Norah casually takes with it, of “room after empty room in their old house,” but even after throwing them away, “negatives and all…they still haunted him. He was afraid they always would. He had lied, after all; he had given away their daughter.” David earns fame through his hobby, and his most famous picture is one he takes of Norah at the beach, an illusion that leaves viewers questioning whether they are looking at the curves of a woman or at the outlines of sand on the beach. As Norah observes, the photo leaves her disembodied and suggests her absence more than it does her presence: “I still don't see it,” Norah wonders, “Why take the photo of me at all, if you're hoping I'll just disappear into the landscape?” Edwards's attention to the nature of this photo suggests that David's insistence on erasing the past has pervaded his life. Denying memory renders those closest to him invisible as well.

David is finally only able to release his obsession with memory-keeping, with capturing images before they change, at the very end of the novel. When he watches Rosemary and her son Jack walk down the narrow sidewalk into their new future, he realizes “he was forgetting things with every step he took. Sometimes his photographs amazed him…and what would he have of this moment in another year, in five? The sun in Rosemary's hair, and the dirt beneath her fingernails, and the faint clean scent of soap. And somehow, that would be enough.” The motion and constantly shifting images in what David sees contrast greatly with the static images David is obsessed with capturing before this point. As he learns to allow memories to live as they are, he frees himself from his incessant and doomed attempt to keep memories pinned down.

Secrecy

The most treacherous memories are those intentionally turned into secrets. David tells his son that “photography is all about secrets…the secrets we all have and will never tell.” This novel could have also been titled The Secret Keeper's Daughter, as the secret David and Caroline share multiplies and spreads out into many other lies and deceptions. Just after David tells his wife their second baby died at birth, a moment that would haunt him “in the months and years to come: the turning point of his life, the moments around which everything else would always gather,” Caroline finds herself having to deceive Al, the stranger she meets in the parking lot. As she begins to fabricate stories about herself and Phoebe, she thinks “it seemed there was no end at all to the lies a person could tell, once she got started.” When she lies to her nosy neighbor who inquires about Al and Phoebe, she lies “easily, amazed all over again at this sudden facility she'd developed, the fluidity and ease of her lies. They came to her whole; they didn't even make her blink.” But during the funeral service, the minister speaks ominously of secrecy: “The night is as clear as day; the darkness and light are to thee both alike…. Thou has set our misdeeds before thee, and our secret sins in the light of thy countenance.…For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.” Through these timeless words, Edwards foreshadows the tragic outcome of those who keep secrets alive regardless of the consequences.

David's secrecy leads indirectly to Norah's deception and secrecy. When Norah has her first affair with Howard, David discerns their intimacy through a photograph of “Norah and Howard on the porch, lifting their glasses of wine in a toast, laughing. A moment both innocent and charged; a moment when a choice was being made.” He decides to expose it to light, which paradoxically makes it “slowly darken until—within a day or two—it would be completely black.” So accustomed to keeping secrets to avoid shame, David destroys the image that would bring to light Norah's deception. Edwards plays with the notion that the exposure of secrets is reversed in photography, where an image can literally disappear when exposed to light. David treats Norah's deception the way he treats his own falsehood; he keeps her secrets because of the immense guilt he feels in keeping his.

In the end, instead of revealing some kind of truth, David's photography has perpetuated secrets and lies. When Caroline finally reveals the secret of Phoebe's existence to Norah, Norah destroys David's collection of photographs. She imagines the curators yelling at her that she is “destroying history!” “No,” she thinks, “I'm claiming it.” When she does this, “she burned light, she burned shadow, she burned these memories of David's, so carefully captured and preserved.” The revelation of the secret allows her to bury David's distortions of the past: “Ashes to ashes,” she thinks, “Dust, at last, to dust.” Ironically, for Norah, when the photographic images are destroyed, the truth prevails.

TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY

Each of the characters in The Memory Keeper's Daughter suffers some kind of loss or tragedy. Who do you think is the most tragic character in the novel?
Research the Kubler-Ross model of dealing with grief. How does Edwards represent these stages? Are there some stages that do not occur for the characters of The Memory Keeper's Daughter?Why might this happen?
Research the ways those with Down syndrome are treated today. What are the differences between what Edwards describes and the education and career options available to people with Down syndrome today? How do Edwards's descriptions of the changes in Phoebe's experience relate to what you have found?
How do you think the early differences between Bree and Norah are reflective of women's lives today? How is the gap between the way they live related to the differences between the lives of mothers and working women today? Does Edwards attach moral value to feminismand women's liberation, or does she suggest something different? Have a debate in class, with one speaker defending Bree's freedom and another speaker defending Norah's choice to be at home.
How do Edwards's descriptions of David's photography relate to the themes of the novel as a whole? Why does she use photography as a metaphor for keeping secrets, when it represents the world so accurately? How does she suggest different interpretations of the way David's photography functions in the novel? Bring a photograph to class that can be interpreted in different ways and discuss the differences.
What do you think of Edwards's description of Phoebe and the other characters who have Down syndrome? What does she suggest about the way one with Down syndrome experiences the world in similar and different ways than those who do not have the disorder?

STYLE

Narrative

The novel is structured chronologically, with descriptions of the separate lives of David and his family and Caroline and Phoebe in the years 1965, 1970, 1977, 1982, 1988, and 1989. The fragmented structure of the narrative reflects the fragmented nature of the lives David, Norah, and Paul lead, and the unnatural gulf between them and their missing family member. The narrative structure begins with two consecutive years, and then portrays a slice of the Henrys' and Simpsons' lives about every five years until the final two consecutive years a quarter of a century later. The story is told in chronological order, in limited omniscience with the narrator merging with one character or another, but primarily focusing on David, Caroline, Norah, and Paul. Though it follows this chronology, it is clear that characters are haunted by their pasts, which are recounted in flashback episodes. David and Caroline, the keepers of the secret, have the most concrete memories, while Norah, Paul, and the rest of the characters are not given such interiority.

Character Whatever their actions, Edwards's characters in this novel are far from simple. There is neither a villain nor a hero, and yet characters are drawn in such a way that readers care what happens to them, as is clear in the positive reviews of the novel. For example, we first meet David taking great care to ensure that his wife is comfortable, feeling “a surge of love and

wonder” in gazing admiringly at Norah. He is protective, wanting “to carry her up flights of stairs, to wrap her in blankets, to bring her cups of custard.” He is immediately likable, though he will tell a lie that destroys himself as well as his family. Even the lie he tells originates with what he believes is a good intention to save his family from the heartache he experienced as a child. The inner lives of characters, moreover, are constructed with such attention to detail and self-awareness that they become intensely real. Caroline, who has been in love with David, remembers his generosity as a doctor who would see patients who could not afford to be seen, even as her anger that he has abandoned his daughter takes hold of her.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Second Wave Feminism

The tension between generations of women in the 1960s is represented in the original clash between Norah, the traditional stay-at-home mother, and her sister Bree, who rejects conventional constraints for women. Edwards describes Norah's astonishment that Bree can get away with eloping and divorcing in such quick succession: “something had begun to change in the world since Norah was a girl, and Bree had not come home as expected, chastened and embarrassed. Instead, she'd enrolled at the university, changing her name from Brigitte to Bree because she liked the way it sounded: breezy, she said, and free.” After women won several legal rights in the early twentieth century, from the right to vote to entry into the working world, women of the 1960s began to fight against persisting discrimination. When Betty Friedan published her famous bestseller The Feminine Mystique in 1963, it resonated with middle-class educated women who began to question their limited role as homemakers. Bree teases Norah that she has become “Suzy Homemaker,” a charge that outrages Norah, who is highly aware that her image is less than progressive. The Civil Rights Act that passed in 1964 began a wave of investigations into sexual discrimination. In the sixties and seventies, women joined forces with war protesters and civil rights workers to continue the fight for equality, a phenomenon Edwards dramatizes when Norah encounters Bree at an anti-war rally on the university campus. By the end of the novel, in 1989, however, Norah and Bree are very similar. They both work at IBM and live very liberated lives, though Norah remarries in the final scene, an act some feminists would read as regressive rather than progressive.

Down syndrome

Down syndrome is a genetic disorder caused by an overabundance of chromosomes in one's body. It was first identified by John Langdon Down, the British doctor for whom it is named. His report, published in 1866, was titled “Observations on an ethnic classification of idiots.” He believed that the children with this syndrome resembled those of Blumenbach's Mongolian race, which led him to use terms like “mongoloid,” a term David uses when he discovers the condition in his newborn daughter. The condition is often associated with cognitive delay, stunted physical growth, and the presence of unique facial characteristics. In 1964, the disease was still known as “Mongolian idiocy.” Most born with this disorder were institutionalized, and since medical problems associated with the disorder were not treated, most patients died in infancy or early adult life. In 1965, responding to protests from the Mongolian delegate, the World Health Organization finally stopped using references to mongolism. It is now known that with early intervention, medical treatment, an altered family environment and vocational training, a person with Down's syndrome can live an improved quality of life.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW

The popular success of The Memory Keeper's Daughter surprised its author, who was previously known only to readers of literary journals and short story collections. Her first published collection, The Secrets of a Fire King (1997), won her critical acclaim with serious readers and writers of fiction. In a New York Times book review, for example, Nina Sonenberg described the collection as an “accomplished” debut. Tom Wilhelmus wrote in The Hudson Review that Edwards's writing is “rich in detail,” and that the collection “mark[s] an impressive beginning for a talented new storyteller.”

When Edwards published The Memory Keeper's Daughter eight years later, she did not expect such widespread acclaim for her first novel. As she remarks on her website, “nothing could have prepared me for the breathtaking reception of The Memory Keeper's Daughter in paperback, simultaneously reaching the number-one place on the New York Times, USA Today, Publisher's Weekly, and Book Sense best-seller lists within just weeks of publication.” Keddy Ann Outlaw describes the way Edwards's novel appeals to readers of both literary and commercial fiction when she praises it as “a heart-wrenching book, by turns light and dark, literary and suspenseful.” Carolyn Kubisz focuses on the novel's careful balancing of despair and hope when she recommends it as a “moving story of two families bound by a secret that both eats away at relationships and eventually helps to create new ones.” Edwards's careful negotiation of both serious and popular fiction in her narrative, and her treatment of tragedy tempered with hopeful outcomes, are elements that have ensured the continued success of this novel.

CRITICISM

Kathleen Helal

Kathleen Helal is an instructor of English literature and composition. She received her doctorate in twentieth-century British and American literature, and has published critical articles in literary journals such as Women's Studies and South Central Review . In this essay, Helal describes Edwards's exploration of grief.

In an interview published to coincide with the release of The Memory Keeper's Daughter, Kim Edwards speaks of one of the central emotions in the novel for both the characters and readers alike: grief. She remembers

stories, growing up, of adults in my town who had suffered terrible losses. There was a kind of silence around such people. Everyone knew their history, and the imprint of the loss was visible in the unfolding of their lives, but no one ever mentioned the person who had died.

Certainly, this novel, with its many layers of grief surrounding the loss of a child, the loss of a father, the loss of a mother, and the loss of the innocence of childhood, resonates with many readers. Loss is always difficult, but as Edwards shows, it becomes tragic when the process of grief is interrupted and unexpressed.

The Memory Keeper's Daughter dramatizes the repression of death, loss, and grief as a tragedy in the characters of Norah, David, and Paul. The action in the novel centers around a fateful decision made by David: after delivering his own twins one snowy night, he elects to send his daughter, who has Down syndrome, away to a private facility and tell his wife that she was stillborn. Just days after David tells Norah this lie, she experiences her loss in vivid dreams:

[Norah] had been dreaming, searching on frozen ground for something she had lost. Blades of grass, sharp and brittle, shattered at her touch, leaving tiny cuts on her flesh. Waking, she held her hands up, momentarily confused, but her hands were unmarked, her nails carefully filed and polished.

She is unable to discuss the death with her husband, who suffers so greatly from the guilt of lying to her about the baby's fate that he is incapable of talking of the death at all. Her sense of loss is left non-verbal, and exists only in a cluster of images that surface during sleep, when the subconscious is left free. The image of the dream is contrasted with the fragile and superficial surface of things; hands that were cut are now perfectly manicured, without a trace of injury. She awakes “momentarily confused,” with a sense of bewilderment that life is continuing as though everything were normal.

Norah's friends, who bring gifts but do not want to discuss her loss, contribute to the artifice rather than helping her heal. Needing to see the body of her baby, whom she named Phoebe, to experience the reality of her death, Norah asks David to take her to the body. When he denies her, he reminds her that “she isn't here” and that she has been buried. Unable to process this information in awakened consciousness, Norah feels a desire to disappear:

Norah closed her eyes then, feeling something drain out of her at the thought of an infant, her daughter, being lowered into the cold March earth. Her arms, holding Paul (Phoebe's twin), were stiff and steady, but the rest of her felt liquid, as if she too might flow away into the ditches and disappear with the snow.

Anything can happen, Norah thinks, in a world in which a daughter dies stillborn and then disappears, never to be seen again. Her early grief is unexpressed, and she feels extremely isolated from her husband, who is not grieving in the same way. Aside from her sister Bree, who cannot fully understand her pain, no one else is willing to connect with her.

The following year, Norah's grief continues to worsen, as she does not have the resources or support to move through it:

Depression—years later she would understand the murky light she lived in—but no one talked about this in 1965. No one even considered it. Certainly not for Norah, who had her house, her baby, her doctor husband. She was supposed to be content.

Not only was hormonal fluctuation and the depression that can accompany it misunderstood or unknown in past generations, but mental illness also was not understood as it is today. There were no doctors who screened new mothers for signs of depression caused by the chemical changes that occur in the brain after birth, and there were no support groups that could have provided an outlet for a grieving mother to move through her emotions in a healthy way. There was, however, distraction. The first time Norah is alone, she faces what she fears the most: the truth of her emotions:“Had she been alone, even once, since Paul was born? She did not think so. She had avoided such moments of solitude, moments of stillness when thoughts of her lost daughter might come rising up, unbidden.” She remembers the funeral, but without counseling, she has no closure:

The memorial service; held in the church courtyard beneath the harsh light of the new March sun, had helped, but Norah sometimes still had the sense, inexplicably, of her daughter's presence, as if she might turn and see her on the stairs or standing outside on the lawn.

During this time alone, Norah finds the pain of her grief almost unbearable. She drains two bottles of wine she has bought to celebrate her anniversary with David, who has been delayed at the hospital: “I'm drunk, she thought, surprised and mildly pleased with herself. She had never been drunk before.” Unfortunately, she would revel in the fact that alcohol could make her forget her bad memories, and drinking would become a habit.

During the next five years, Norah pushes her grief down by crowding her schedule with things to do and by drinking to medicate herself:

Norah could not sit still; it made her too uneasy. So she arranged meetings and filled up her days, always with the desperate sense that if she let down her guard, even for a moment, disaster would follow.

Filling her schedule helped most of the time, but the grief would resurface, and she would develop more destructive ways of coping: “The feeling was worst in the late morning; she almost always had a quick drink then.” When there is not enough distraction, her coping mechanisms become even more dangerous.

Telling Kay Marshall about her need to take down a wasp's nest before Paul's sixth birthday party, Norah “hoped it would take all morning” so she would be distracted from her dark broodings. When her coping strategies of distraction and drinking fail, she begins to contemplate suicide, a thought she is only able to articulate to herself as an attraction to the water of the river:“The river, its calming swirl, called to her.” It is clear that the grief of her loss has changed Norah completely.

Seven years later, Norah wins a vacation through the travel agency for which she works. She hopes “this dream vacation would be a path back to the closeness they'd once shared…. but they had been here three days now, and nothing but the setting was significantly different from home.” Escape on vacation is unsuccessful; Norah's habit of repressing the loss of her daughter and David's habit of denying the truth take all of their energy, and the reader is left with a profound sense of their loss. Furthermore, the couple is tragically unable to see the gifts of Paul, their healthy son who is vibrantly alive, right before them, yet unseen. Norah wonders at her inability to connect with her husband: “Their lost daughter still hovered between them; their lives had shaped themselves around her absence.” Having Howard, a stranger, to dinner helps Norah realize that the loss—and their inability to process it—has fixed them in time: “Somewhere along the way, she and David had gotten stuck. They circled each other now, fixed in their separate orbits.” Not only has she lost her baby, but also she has lost her husband.

At this point in the novel, David's sense of the loss of his sister June—a loss that causes him to make his fateful decision to give Phoebe away—comes into focus. His hobby of photography, a poetic metaphor for his attempt to freeze moments and possess images and memories, only makes things worse. When he discusses photography with Howard, David's words represent Norah as “object, not subject,” she observes: “Norah would find a photo, anonymous yet eerily familiar too…an image of her own flesh that had become abstract, an idea.” She comes to realize that “[David] did not really see her and hadn't for years.” The very tool that might help David understand what was happening to his family—the unexpressed sadness, the longing for connection, the lack of intimacy—becomes for him a distraction, an excuse not to face the emotions he records on a regular basis.

Different from Norah's grief, David's sense of loss originates in the unexpressed grief he feels for his sister June. He remembers the loss of June along with the loss of the intimacy of his marriage, as well as the loss of his connection with his son. Unable to tell Norah the truth, so used to repressing memories of the past, David finally secretly writes a letter to Caroline Gill, the nurse to whom he had given baby Phoebe, spilling out all of the emotion he cannot express to his wife and son: “He wrote swiftly, letting the words pour out, all his regrets about the past, all his hopes for Phoebe. Who was she, this child of his flesh, the girl he had given away?” The fact that Phoebe is thriving with Caroline becomes a tragedy for David, who has renounced his daughter:“He had not expected that she would live this long or that she would have the sort of life Caroline wrote him about.” David's sense of loss is exacerbated by the knowledge that he has prevented Paul from having a relationship with his sister: “He thought of his son, sitting all alone on the stage, and of the loneliness Paul carried with him everywhere. Was it the same for Phoebe?”

Paul also suffers from the grief over the loss of what his family should have been, and the loss of the sister he never knew. At thirteen, he is keenly aware of the loss of his parents and what should be a loving relationship. He grieves especially for the loss of his father, who is deeply immersed in repressing memories and obsessed with avoiding truth. Both David and Norah have become mere shadows of the parents they should be to Paul, smiling phantoms accustomed to denying the truth, disappearing more and more as Paul matures.

Both David and Norah begin to face their grief eventually, though only after the loss of intimacy in their relationship and the loss of the connection with their son. When David returns to the home of his childhood, all of the memories he has worked so hard to repress—even to the point of denying his own identity and erasing his family name—come flooding back. Vivid memories of his mother's grief come back to him:

Fall came, and winter, and June did not sit up…and then it was her first birthday and she was too weak to walk far…. He remembered his mother…tears sliding silently down her face for a long time before she took a deep breath and turned back into the room and went on. This was the grief he had carried with him, heavy as a stone in his heart. This was the grief he had tried to spare Norah and Paul, only to create so many others.

It is only much later in life that David can look back and reflect on the repression of grief as a normal part of life. He remembers the short memorial for June as the only time he openly expressed emotion over her death: “He had only wept once for June, standing with his mother on the hillside in the raw evening wind….”

Ironically, it is the experience of physical restraint that helps David break through his emotional restraint. David surprises a young pregnant woman, Rosemary, in his childhood home. Not knowing she is there, he falls asleep and she ties him up. While trying to reassure her that he is not dangerous, he finds he finally has the audience he needs to express his grief, and he does so without reservation: “He talked like a river, like a storm, words rushing through the old house with a force and life he could not stop….” When Rosemary finally cuts him loose, her words “You're free” have a double meaning: he is both physically liberated from the ties around his wrists and mentally liberated from the grief he was conditioned to repress.

In a very different setting, Norah faces and expresses her grief as well. Searching for the Abbey of Gethsemani, Bree takes Norah and Paul to an old church that reminds her of the church where she believes Phoebe is buried. Entering the church, Norah remembers her decision to isolate herself from the women in her circle of friends:

Norah had not wanted to be one of them or to accept their comfort, and she had walked away. Remembering, her eyes filled with tears…. Grief, it seemed, was a physical place. Norah wept, unaware of anything except a kind of release she remembered from childhood; she sobbed until she was aching, breathless, spent.

While David's return to his childhood home allows him to work through his grief, the church frees Norah from hers: “It didn't make any sense to her, that this place should have brought her such peace, but it had.”

In the end, David eases the pain of his grief by adopting Rosemary, who is similar in age to Phoebe, and caring for her as though she were his daughter. Norah has found happiness in a new relationship, and is able to heal the grief and anger that tormented her, but only at the price of forgiveness. She teaches her son that “we have a choice. To be bitter and angry, or to try to move on. It's the hardest thing for me, letting go of all that righteous anger…. But that's what I want to do.” Her letting go allows Paul to let go as well. In the final scene, Paul and Phoebe take the opportunity to move beyond grief, with each others' support when they visit David's grave. “Our father,” David announces to Phoebe, who misunderstands and begins to recite the Lord's Prayer, an echo of David's moment of grief at June's memorial service. Paul interrupts the prayer to repeat the truth of their father's death to Phoebe. Rather than reciting a prayer that could be repeated by anyone anywhere, Paul moves beyond the repetition of the denial of grief to attempt to communicate his sense of loss for his father. His feelings give him a revelation: his anger at his father has finally cleared At the novel's conclusion, we are left with images and emotions that were impossible for David: the image of a reunited brother and sister, and the replacement of grief with forgiveness and love.

Source: Kathleen Helal, Critical Essay on The Memory Keeper's Daughter, in News makers for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning 2009.

WHAT DO I READ NEXT?

Secrets of a Fire King (1997), Edwards's first collection of short stories, is an award-winning showcase of her early talent.
My Sister's Keeper: A Novel (2004) is Jodi Picoult's exploration of what happens to a family when one member is diagnosed with leukemia.
In Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Virginia Woolf dramatizes one day in the life of its main character, who is emotionally distant from her daughter and husband, and who longs to break free from the constraints of her conventional life. Edwards mentions Woolf as one of Bree's favorite authors.
Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia (2006) is Elizabeth Gilbert's memoir of her search for happiness after divorce.

Anna Richardson

In the following essay, Edwards tries to account for the popularity of The Memory Keeper's Daughter with book clubs.

The opening chapter of Kim Edwards' debut novel, The Memory Keeper's Daughter (Penguin, April), sets a tragic scene. On a winter night in the 1960s, a doctor gives away his newborn twin daughter Phoebe when he realises she has Down's syndrome—a decision that will affect him and the rest of his family for decades afterwards.

According to Edwards, the book was nearly not written at all. “My initial response to the idea was that it would be a great story, but also that I would never write this book,” she says. “Not only was I worried that I was completely ignorant of Down's syndrome itself, but also the idea of undertaking the task of writing a character with Down's syndrome was daunting.”

Edwards, assistant professor for creative writing at the University of Kentucky, has been writing for more than 20 years. Some of her short stories were published to critical acclaim, but it was only when she came up with the idea for The Memory Keeper's Daughter that she decided to write her debut novel.

“I knew at once that it was much larger than a [short] story, and I think that in my life I was ready to take on the challenge of writing a novel, to try a new genre.”

Edwards spent three years writing the book, and even though she found it challenging at times, she enjoyed it. “When I wrote the first chapter, it came very quickly, because I had been working it out in my subconscious for quite a while.” The novel has two strands: one follows the father, Dr David Henry, and his family, while the other tracks the nurse who decides to raise Phoebe as her own daughter. “I knew I would need to follow each of the characters to see how the events of that night resonated in each of their lives,” Edwards says.

It was especially important to her to represent Phoebe as a realistic character and “not to sentimentalise her”. She immersed herself in research and met parents of children with Down's syndrome. “When I sent the novel to the parents, it was more nerve-racking than sending it to the publisher,” she says. “There was a lot at stake.”

It seems the author got it right. The US paperback edition entered the New York Times bestseller list, where it has featured for more than 30 weeks—success that Edwards is still getting used to: “Of course you always want your books to do well, but the magnitude of the reception was beyond anybody's wildest dreams.”

She is taking the accolades in her stride, however: “I think it's necessary as a writer to detach yourself from what happens to a book when it goes out into the world. It's necessary to me artistically to be true to the integrity of the book.”

As for the reason for the book's success, Edwards believes it struck a chord with her readers: “I think that it engenders thoughtfulness; it's very popular in book groups because it provokes a tremendous amount of discussion. We all have secrets, and I think that people can identify with the book in that way.”

Source: Anna Richardson, “The Family Secret: Anna Richardson talks to Kim Edwards,” in The Bookseller, Vol. 23, No. 1, March 9, 2007, p. 1.