Book Review: The Memory Keeper's Daughter

Title: The Memory Keeper’s Daughter

Author: Kim Edwards

Publisher: Penguin

Date: 2005

ISBN: 0-14-30-3714-5

Length: 401 pages

Quote: “My dear, I know nothing about babies, but even I can sense that something’s not right…She’s nearly a year old and only now learning to sit up.”

It was a dark and stormy night in 1964, when babies were normally delivered from fully anesthetized women. Delivering his own twins, young Dr. Henry was reminded of his poor afflicted sister, and he handed the baby who had Downs Syndrome, like his sister, to a nurse with orders to put it in an institution. He would allow his wife to believe it had died. He would spend the rest of his life remembering how much he had loved and missed his sister, and wishing he’d given himself a chance to know his daughter.

Nurse Gill, instead, takes the baby and goes out to find another job, in another city. Putting babies in institutions just seems so, oh, unfeeling. She’s never been interested in being a single mother in the usual way, but she bonds instantly with little Phoebe.

If you are a young woman reading this book, you’re supposed to share Nurse Gill’s intuitive feeling that putting babies in institutions is unfeeling, and the rest of the story—Phoebe grows up, the Henrys drift apart—is supposed to convince you that, if you happen to give birth to a brain-damaged baby, you’re supposed to love every moment of raising the poor little thing, and if you don’t, you might want to run out and adopt one, because brain-damaged children are the greatest thing since sliced bread.

If that sounds like a flippant summary, that’s because I’m not convinced. I am turned off by stories that start out with detailed descriptions of complicated births, for a start. I continued reading this one because I’d heard that it was good. I did not find a point at which I got interested in the story or any of the characters.

Despite some verbiage about Dr. Henry not being an evil man, just a man whose hasty choice gradually ruins the rest of his life, I felt judged.

Our abilities to work with other people’s different combinations of talents and disabilities are as variable as anything else we inherit. I’ve done reasonably well with blind and mobility-impaired people; I’ve never done well at all with deaf or cognitively impaired people. Though symptoms of pregnancy-blocking ovarian cysts appeared in the year older people admitted I might be old enough to consider motherhood, so I’ve never had to think seriously about having a baby of any description, in my gossipy little town rumors used to fly every time a sister or cousin gave birth. (And I have a lot of cousins...hyperfertility runs in the family and, yes, one young lady who looks a bit like me had six babies, the first one born within a month of its uncle, and yes, she was married to its father.) 

One of those babies, who wasn’t mine but whom I was actually seen carrying around, happened to be deaf. While it was tiny, its not being disturbed by sounds was convenient. When it started toddling about and showing how much information it was not absorbing by hearing words, communication with it became one of those exercises in frustration nobody wants to go through, with adults repeating, louder and louder, the words the child just doesn't understand, until the child starts to cry because (it’s not able to say) “Right, now I hear you saying ‘coat, coat, where did you leave your coat,’ but what is a coat and why do I, alone of all the world, not already know this?” Because I felt particularly fond and protective of that child—now a bright, good-looking young adult with job skills and talents, likely to enjoy a long healthy life—I started saying “Don’t send that one to stay with me. Our disabilities clash. It's deaf, and I'm not good with deaf people.” I believed it was an intelligent child with good intentions, and didn’t want to give it any foolish notions to the contrary. I expect I’d feel the same way, but more so, about a child with Downs Syndrome. Would I keep one, if I’d given birth to one? In the alternative world where that could happen, who would the child’s other parent be, would he have better communication skills than I have, what kind of nursery and tutors could we afford?

On another web site, some time before writing this review, I got into a discussion about the “choice” of abortion. I don’t believe a fetus is a person, and if it were a person an unwanted fetus would be a trespasser, and the fact that any fetus is unwanted may indicate that there’s a reason why it's not meant to become a person. Normal healthy fetuses are loved, often given names and rooms, from the moment their existence is confirmed. I don’t know how good for the babies it would be in the long term, but I would find it delightful in the short term, if all the anti-abortion activists in this country were required to adopt some wanted fetuses who have become homeless babies.

I do believe that, statistically, giving birth is safer than having a surgical abortion, and I’ve seen evidence that, statistically, most women who “choose” abortion are bullied into echoing the “choices” their men and/or their parents and/or social workers make for them. So I don’t imagine I could ever have chosen abortion in that alternative world where I might have become pregnant. Daughter and granddaughter of poster girls for live natural birth against all odds, and, more importantly, of devoted Christian parents…If someone had spiked my drink so that I’d behaved irresponsibly on a date, and my date and I had been expelled from our church college, and his parents had threatened my life if I sent him so much as a postcard, and add any more melodramatic details that come to mind, what I could then and can now imagine happening would have been more like the’rents saying, “Here are directions to the home of the relative out West you should visit first, here’s the local lawyer who can advise you on changing your name, here’s a ticket…and call 'collect' as soon as you get inside the house!” It would still have been the 1980s and some mumbling about a short-lived fictional marriage might have been expected, but before the baby was a year old my parents would have wanted to see their grandchild. There were reasons why my natural sister eloped, though her children, plural, resemble their father, singular, but in any case both of our parents absolutely adored having grandchildren. So I have no idea how I’d react to an unintended pregnancy if I’d had the sort of "Eeek, I'm not old enough to be a grandmother, call this doctor, he'll help you get rid of it" parents many single mothers seem to have.

Likewise, I have no idea how I’d relate to a baby who was born deaf. I’m not altogether sure how I’d relate to a baby who even had extroversion, much less Downs Syndrome. In theory parental hormones compensate for a lot of things for both fathers and mothers; in practice, if parents know they’re not going to be able to communicate with a child, putting the child in an institution, or giving it to anyone who wanted it, might be a better choice than keeping it.

In The Memory Keeper’s Daughter the doctor’s emotional feelings about having been unable to help his (older) sister when he was a little boy, and feeling unable to keep his daughter later on, push him away from his wife and son, and the family falls apart, while the nurse just enjoys raising her adoptive daughter. It’s a novel, I remind myself; that’s one way the situation could have played out. Then again, if the doctor, who had had the experience of loving someone who has Downs Syndrome, had insisted that his wife rear their daughter, that might have pushed him away from his wife and son even faster than his unspoken guilt trip did. If he’d married a better sort of woman, however far apart they might have drifted, she wouldn’t have thrown herself at so many other men, would have concentrated on her own career until one day he was able to confess and she was able to say “Oh, is that all you were hiding.” If the nurse, for that matter, had been a different sort of woman, she might have said, one day when baby Phoebe was young, “This is not working,” and carried out the original orders to put the child in an institution. We never know how this kind of complex situation is going to resolve itself in real life.

Being so attached to our own modes of perceiving, thinking, and communicating that we can't work out how to communicate with people or animals who perceive a different world than we do, actually, is a disability. It seems to be common. Justifying it by claiming that it's "normal" to feel that "the disabled" should be kept away from "normal" people, as the Old Left used to do, or used in medical experiments, as the National Socialists recommended, is bad and should be judged harshly. Simply acknowledging it as a disability and trying to give children the chance to be reared by people who don't share that disability seems to be humane. Edwards doesn't seem to recognize that these are two different things. For my relative who lost so much hearing at such an early age to be able to communicate with me would involve person's being intelligent enough to work with my disability, which is possible but not to be taken for granted in those cases where it happens. Helen Keller's genius was not her finding ways to read and learn, but her ability to communicate with the "normal." For me to have insisted on my fair share of time bringing up that child, in view of my disability, would have been inhumane.

Edwards says that her story was “given” to her by someone whose real story resolved itself differently from her novel: the baby with Downs Syndrome was put in the institution and lived and died there before his own mother heard that he’d been born. That baby’s brother grew up to be a man who wanted to “make Downs Syndrome children visible to the world.” That’s not an unreasonable goal.

Actually, before reading this book, I knew a couple who’d been warned that children they had were likely to have Downs Syndrome and agreed, based on their experience of life with people who had that gene, that they could enjoy sharing the short lives of children who’d be lucky to reach a mental age of seven before dying at the physical age of thirty. It’s not a decision I’m sure I want to understand, but since they took full responsibility for both of their Downs Syndrome children it is a decision I respect. Perhaps if Edwards had talked to them, and written about a family that fully accept a Downs Syndrome child, she would have written a story that would read as more persuasive and less judgmental than The Memory Keeper’s Daughter.

Many consider Edwards a good writer; and this novel even has Pittsburgh in it. This is an indication of how thoroughly the book turned me off. Though I like my own home and have no desire to go anywhere else, physically, I enjoy armchair traveling, love the scenery in western Pennsylvania, and have particularly warm memories of Pittsburgh. I found The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, the doctor and his family, so abrasive that I didn’t even feel interested in its descriptions of Pittsburgh.