The Memory Keeper's Daughter

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Heavy snowfall from “the sort of storm that rarely happened in Lexington” serves to force David Henry, an orthopedic surgeon, to assume the role himself when his wife’s obstetrician is unable to make it.

Edwards has stated that she’s drawn to writing about explorations of the past and the long-term effects of lingering secrets. Climax: After David Henry’s death, Caroline Gill travels to Lexington, Kentucky to inform Norah Henry that her daughter Phoebe is alive and well in Pittsburgh. And he saw Norah and Paul reaching out and striking rock and not understanding what was happening, only that something stood between them that could not be seen or broken. His life turned around that single action: a newborn child in his arms—and then he reached out to give her away.Later, when he considered this night—and he would think of it often, in the months and years to come: the turning point of his life, the moments around which everything else would always gather—what he remembered was the silence in the room and the snow falling steadily outside. You must be crazy,” Norah said, though even as she spoke so many jagged pieces of her life were falling into place that she knew what Caroline was saying must be true. The novel is an exploration of the various ways in which women have made progress in being able to choose their own destinies and shape their own identities. Rumor has it that Kim Edwards got the idea for the stranger-than-fiction premise at the heart of The Memory Keeper’s Daughter from a local pastor who told her a story about a man who, much later in life, discovered he’d had a twin brother with Down syndrome who’d been placed in an institution at birth. He closed his eyes, fear rising, because he had seen anger in her eyes, because everything that happened had been his fault.

Rather than owning up to his mistakes, though, David retreats into an obsession with photography, which stems from a desire to find one perfect moment that will carry the same weight as the moment he chose to give Phoebe away. When they reached the car she touched his arm and gestured to the house, veiled with snow and glowing like a lantern in the darkness of the street. Paul reached out into the hot, humid air, feeling as if he were standing in one of his father’s photographs, where trees bloomed up in the pulse of a heart, where the world was suddenly not what it seemed.Two things happen as a result of this unforeseen circumstance which would not have occurred otherwise: his wife gives birth while under the effect of anesthesia which allows him to make the rash decision to give away their son’s twin sister who was born with Down syndrome and to tell his wife that their daughter died without her ever knowing the truth. The story covers the memory as theme from the concept of how it can impact the future course of life to the struggle to define by purposeful forgetting.

It is not just random chance that the twin which author chose for the father to give away is the daughter rather than the male. Stubborn yet sensitive, with a debilitating need to try and fix the past and master the future, David’s individual arc ties in with all of the novel’s major themes. But watching David now, absorbed in his explanation, she understood that he did not really see her and hadn’t for years. The Memory Keeper’s Daughter spans a period of 25 years, as the events of the novel begin in 1964 and continue to unfold through 1989. These tulips are so beautiful,” he began, but he was unable to explain himself, unable to put into words why these images compelled him so.David is both protagonist and antagonist in many ways—he is his own worst enemy, and his hubris affects everything around him. The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, a massive bestseller which lingered for 122 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list and was included in uncountable book clubs across the country, is in many ways an issues book—a novel which deliberately asks hard questions of its readers, often engaging them in an ethical dilemma and forcing them to confront the choices they might make were they placed in the characters’ shoes. The novel’s protagonist and its most inscrutable, complex character, David Henry is haunted by a past full of poverty, grief, and loss when he makes the painful decision to send away his newborn daughter Phoebe—who has been born with Down syndrome.

He talked like a river, like a storm, words rushing through the old house with a force and life he could not stop.

David Henry’s decision to give away his Down syndrome-affected daughter Phoebe sparked a national conversation, and the book quickly joined the ranks of popular book-club reads like Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees, Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, and Jodi Picoult’s My Sister’s Keeper. The Memory Keeper, it said on the box, in white italic letters; this, she realized, was why she’d bought it—so he’d capture every moment, so he’d never forget. A finder of lost things, a girl who could count to fifty and dress herself and recite the alphabet, a girl who might struggle to speak but who could read Caroline’s mood in an instant. Decisions in the heat of the moment can be made based on the input of things remembered which actually have little direct significance in that moment.