The Memory Keeper's Daughter

“The Memory Keeper’s Daughter” by Kim Edwards 

Reviewed by Gerti

Kim Edwards’ novel “The Memory Keeper’s Daughter” is a strange book for me. I have been reading it compulsively, drawn in by the alternating narrators, who include a doctor named David Henry, his wife Norah, and his former nurse Caroline Gill, who has taken the couple’s Down’s syndrome daughter to be raised out of town. That fact is the heart of the story, but the wrinkles occur when you realize that the couple is on an unequal footing, because the Doctor told his wife that their daughter died at birth, and only the nurse knows that the baby girl survived. The couple also have a son, named Paul, who was the baby Phoebe’s twin. He grows into a moody, alienated teenager, abetted by his bitter mother.

Edwards’ writing is lyrical, almost poetic in places, and easy to read for the most part. But the problem for me is that I don’t like Norah, or her sister Bree, with whom the author seems most sympathetic. Norah creates a distance between herself and her husband over the death of their child, and then blames him for putting up a wall. Dr. Henry’s act stemmed from medical best practices back in the 1960s, and also because he saw how his sister’s death affected his mother when he was young. He doesn’t want the wife he loves to have to experience that grief. So he makes a choice.

It is only as the years go by that the enormity of that mistakes are seen. The doctor asked his nurse to take Phoebe to a local facility where children with Down’s Syndrome were cared for, but Caroline visits the facility and finds it wanting. In love with Dr. Henry, and having little else to stay in town for, she takes the infant and starts a new life in Pittsburgh. The doctor’s mistake is compounded by this act, whether selfish or not, because once he has seen the folly of his decision, he can’t bring Phoebe and her mother together, because he doesn’t know where the nurse has taken her.

The family reunites and attempts, decades later, to repair the damage that has been done. But by then, the Doctor himself is dead, and although he tries to repair his error over the years, Caroline has kept the child away from him, fearful that he would take her back. Dr. Henry has been sending money (when she provided a PO Box), and has set up a trust fund for the child, although the author doesn’t dwell on things like that. It seems that she, along with Norah, is eager to condemn Dr. Henry for his choice during a stressful moment, and all the actions on Norah’s side that divide the couple, like her careless affairs and catty behavior, are laid at his feet for making the initial breach of trust in the marriage.

The book gives me an understanding of how my birth parents could have made a choice that caused me so much pain, and yet seemed so reasonable to them. This book more than anything should be a lesson about not judging people, whether they are disabled or not, without walking a mile in their moccasins. It’s only the author’s prejudice toward Dr. Henry that ultimately mars the book for me.