The Memory Keeper's Daughter - a novel

********** SPOILER WARNING************

I just finished reading that novel by Kim Edwards. Actually I've recently been addicted to reading. I just finished reading "A Thousand Splendid Suns" by Khaled Hossieni and "Life of Pi" by Yann Martel. Right now I'm just starting "Breaking the Tongue" by Vyvyane Loh - a novel about Singapore during the second world war.

Anyway, I'm not going to write about all the novels I read about, but I will write about the ones that stand out for me. The Memory Keeper's Daughter is a beautifully written novel that is both very sad and hopeful. Basically it starts off with a young couple who are expecting their first child. The husband is a doctor and he is forced to deliver his children in the middle of a snow storm. The first baby was a healthy little boy but he immediately recognizes the second little with down syndrome. In the 1960's, it was common to send babies with disabilities to institutions, and that was what this young doctor did. He hands over the baby girl to the nurse and tells his wife that the baby girl died. The nurse proceeds to take the baby girl to the institution, but cannot bear to leave her there, and raises her as her own.

Perhaps the gesture of the doctor seems cruel, but we are soon given insight deeper reasons why this doctor chose to do what he did. We learn that his little sister had suffered from down syndrome and passed away when she was only 12 years old. Leaving sorry and pain for his family. The doctor was never able to come to terms with the pain and the loss, and in his action of giving away his baby, he only hoped to spare his beloved wife and his family of the same fate. We see that after this initial act, an invisible wall begins to form in the family, tearing apart the once happy couple. The doctor is withdrawn, ridden with guilt from his action and his wife continues to grieve her loss and doesn't understand the distance she feels from her husband.

It is in this setting that the first family grows up. The doctor turns to photography and his work to try to escape his guilt and tries in vane to right his wrong. The wife is completely lonely, and turns first to alcohol to escape her sadness and her husband's distance. After wards, she gives up trying to reach out to her husband, she begins to be more independent and tries to work and commit herself to activities to forget about her dead daughter and her husband. Eventually, she turns to affairs. The son, grows up in a hostile home, with expectations to do well. He feels he never really knows his father, and when he discovers his mother's affairs, he doesn't understand why his father doesn't get angry or do anything about it.

At the same time, the nurse - who has never done anything risky in her life, makes a split second decision which changes her life completely. Raising the little girl, Pheobe, she moves to a new place and starts a new life, with Pheobe being her main priority. She struggles to fight for equal opportunity for her daughter in all aspects of her life, whether it be given a chance for education, for health care, for having a life of her own. Given that this was all taking place in the 1970's, it was no ordinary feat. But we see Pheobe, as a beautiful character. Although she has a disability, she is kind, smart and outgoing, and we learn to love her, and we love the nurse for the person she has become.

We observe almost 3 decades of these two families with alternating chapters. It's sad, but also hopeful. I think the theme of this novel is another universal one. The doctor never confronted his loss, and although he acted selfishly by giving up his daughter, he also acted love for his wife. He thought that by this action, he would be able to save his wife, himself, and his son from future heart ache and pain. The doctor eventually completely immerses himself in his work and and photography. He becomes a very famous doctor and his photography becomes widely recognized, but his life is empty.

At one of his exhibitions, he meets again with the nurse, and she says, "You missed a lot of heart ache, sure. But David, you missed a lot of joy." I think that is a central theme in this novel. You have to take risks for love. Love and pain are like ying and yang, you can't have one without the other. As human beings, I think we all try to protect ourselves from hurt and pain. We don't take chances because we are afraid of what may happen if we give all that we can give, and its not enough. And, so we don't do it. We give less than we can, so that if something fails, we believe it will hurt us less. In the case of the doctor, he was afraid to lose someone again, like the way he lost his sister. He tries to protect himself from it, and in the end, he ended up shutting everyone out - and hurting the people he first sought to protect. This is a quote from one of the doctor's reflections:

"David had tried so hard to give him everything. He had tried to be a good father. They'd collected fossils together, organizing them and labeling them and displaying them in the living room. He'd taken Paul fishing at every chance. But however hard he worked to make Paul's life smooth and easy, the fact remained that David had built that life on a lie. He tried to protect his son from the things he himself had suffered from as a child: poverty and worry and grief. Yet his very efforts had created losses David never anticipated. The lie had grown up between them like a rock, forcing them to grow oddly too, like trees twisting around a boulder."

Life doesn't turn out the way you plan them. But the important thing is to be true to your beliefs. I really like this quote from the nurse, upon reflection of her life after taking Pheobe, "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." Life is complex, and it's messy but there is always hope - it may hidden and hard to find, but there is hope, and with hope, there is happiness.

This novel is also about forgiveness and accepting what fate deals us. When the wife finally discovers her daughter is alive, in some twisted way, she realizes the distance and the wall that she had once imagined between her and her husband was very real. And this secret was the foundation. The doctor had passed away at this point, and she has learned to move on, but the knowledge of daughter being alive is overwhelming. When speaking to her son about it, she says, "But you and I and Phoebe, we have a choice. To be bitter and angry, or try to move on. It's the hardest thing for me, letting go of all that righteous anger. I'm still struggling. But that's what I want to do."

It's hard for us to see any character as bad. I see the loneliness and the struggle behind each characters' actions, and at a certain level, I can relate. This is a great book, so beautifully written and elegant. Pain is something I think we can all relate to, but how we choose to deal with the pain, whether it be moving forward, or burying it deep inside us - is what defines our life and not the pain itself.