The Memory Keeper’s Daughter by Kim Edwards: A Heart-Wrenching Family Saga

Book Review: The Memory Keeper’s Daughter

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Summary:

On a winter night in 1964, Dr. David Henry is forced by a blizzard to deliver his own twins. His son, born first, is perfectly healthy. Yet when his daughter is born, he sees immediately that she has Down’s Syndrome. Rationalizing it as a need to protect Norah, his wife, he makes a split-second decision that will alter all of their lives forever. He asks his nurse to take the baby away to an institution and never to reveal the secret. But Caroline, the nurse, cannot leave the infant. Instead, she disappears into another city to raise the child herself. So begins this story that unfolds over a quarter of a century—in which these two families, ignorant of each other, are yet bound by the fateful decision made that long-ago winter night. Norah Henry, who knows only that her daughter died at birth, remains inconsolable; her grief weighs heavily on their marriage. And Paul, their son, raises himself as best he can, in a house grown cold with mourning. Meanwhile, Phoebe, the lost daughter, grows from a sunny child to a vibrant young woman whose mother loves her as fiercely as if she were her own.

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First Paragraph:

The snow began to fall several hours before her labor began. A few flakes first, in the dull gray late-afternoon sky, and then wind-driven swirls and eddies around the edges of their wide front porch. He stood by her side at the window, watching sharp gusts of snow billow, then swirl and drift to the ground. All around the neighborhood, lights came on, and the naked branches of the trees turned white.

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My Thoughts:

I just finished reading The Memory Keeper’s Daughter by Kim Edwards, and I’ve got to say, it tugged on my heart strings from start to finish.

David Henry is a doctor, who has to deliver his own twins due to a bad blizzard. The boy, Paul, is perfectly healthy, but the girl, Phoebe, has Down syndrome. Feeling he has to protect his family from the heartache of dealing with their newborn daughter’s disability, he instructs the nurse, Caroline, to take newly born Phoebe to an institution and tells his wife, Norah, that Phoebe is dead. Instead of leaving the baby at the institution, the nurse disappears to start a new life and raise the infant herself. 

The rest of the story follows the lives of the Henry family and the lives of Caroline of Phoebe through a course of around 25 years. David’s decision to give his daughter away sets off a chain of consequences within David’s household as Norah grieves over her daughter’s supposed death and David loses himself in photography. Even their son, Paul, is filled with angst. Their household is filled with misery. Meanwhile, Caroline struggles to give Phoebe as happy a life as possible in a world that looks down on her.

I’ll go ahead and say that this book will probably depress you. However, it’s also an eye opener. Being the mother of a special needs child myself, I really appreciated being able to follow Caroline and Phoebe’s life and all the obstacles they faced. I greatly admired Caroline and the strength she displayed in fighting for Phoebe. I also admired Al for stepping in and being Phoebe’s father figure.

Phoebe is absolutely precious, and I enjoyed getting to watch her grow up throughout the story. I cheered for her every accomplishment and absolutely loved her ending! She was just as inspiring, if not more, as Caroline. Phoebe is my favorite character, hands down.

The fact that Caroline and Al give her such a warm and loving environment to grow up in melted my heart, because that is exactly what Phoebe deserved from the Henry’s. I resented the hell out of David Henry for not giving his own child a chance, but I think the guilt he carried over the years and the heartache his decision ended up putting on his family was the karma he needed to realize the true extent of his actions.

Kim Edwards shows you this story from almost all the main character’s points of view, so it’s easy to develop a more intimate connection and understanding with all of them. She has a style of writing in this novel that’s almost poetic, and there were plenty of favorite quotes I pulled from the book.

One thing that really made me sad while reading this novel was the realization that life is very short and things are constantly changing. There’s no way to freeze what’s there in front of you. The impermanence of things is obvious.

It also reminded me that, no matter how much you grieve, it will not change what has been done; but it will continue to affect the roads you choose in the future until you face it and find closure. It’s best to just continue to live.  

I have to highlight a moment in the book that made me laugh. Norah decides to get rid of a wasp nest in her yard on her own. Her method of choice? Get a vacuum cleaner hose and stick it into the nest, then wave it around like a magic wand and watch the flying ones buzzing around the outside of the nest magically disappear! Not that it’s a far-fetched idea at all, it just made me laugh trying to picture it.

In all, it was a great read and I highly recommend it!

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Favorite Quotes:

“A moment might be a thousand different things.”

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.

“You can’t stop time. You can’t capture light. You can only turn your face up and let it rain down.”

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

It seemed there was no end at all to the lies a person could tell, once she got started.

His love for her was so deeply woven with resentment that he could not untangle the two.

“You can’t spend the rest of your life tiptoeing around to try and avert disaster. It won’t work. You’ll just end up missing the life you have.”

He’d kept this silence because his own secrets were darker, more hidden, and because he believed that his secrets had created hers.

She didn’t love him and he didn’t love her; she was like an addiction, and what they were doing had a darkness to it, a weight.

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