Kim Edwards

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 syndrome. Rationalizing it as a need to protect Norah, his wife, he makes a split-second decision that will alter all 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 beautifully told 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.

A brilliantly crafted, stunning debut, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter articulates a silent fear close to every parent: What would happen if you lost your child, and she grew up without you? Rich, compulsively readable, and deeply moving, the novel explores the way life takes unexpected turns, and how the mysterious ties that hold a family together help us survive the heartache that occurs when long-buried secrets burst into the open. Yet it is also an astonishing tale of redemptive love.

BACKSTORY:

A few months after my story collection, The Secrets of a Fire King was published, a pastor I knew said she’d read my book and had a story to give me—a story about a secret. It happens fairly often that people want to give me stories, and invariably those stories are not mine to tell. I thanked her, went home, and didn’t think much more about it.

A week or two later, she stopped me again. I really have to tell you this story, she said, and she did. It was just a few sentences, about a man she knew who’d discovered, late in life, that his brother had been born with Down syndrome, placed in an institution at birth, and kept a secret from his family. He’d spent his life in that institution and had died there. I remember being struck by the story even as she told it, and thinking right away that it really would make a good novel. Still, in the very next heartbeat, I thought: of course, I’ll never write that book.

And I didn’t, not for years. The idea stayed with me, however. Eventually, in an unrelated moment, I was invited to do a writing workshop for adults with mental challenges. We had a wonderful morning, full of expression and surprises poetry. At the end of the class, several of the participants hugged me.

I found myself thinking of this novel idea again, with a greater sense of urgency and interest. Still, it was another year before I started to write. Then the first chapter came swiftly, almost fully formed, that initial seed having grown while I wasn’t really paying attention. In her Paris Review interview, Katherine Anne Porter talks about the event of a story being like a stone thrown in water—she says it’s not the event itself that’s interesting, but rather the ripples the event creates in the lives of characters. I found this to be true. Once I’d written the first chapter, I wanted to find out more about who these people were and what happened to them as a consequence of David’s decision; I couldn’t stop until I knew.

 

PRAISE:

“Edwards is a born novelist….The Memory Keeper’s Daughter is rich with psychological detail and the nuances of human connection. [An] extraordinary debut.”

—Chicago Tribune

“This tragedy of a man who thinks he can control how lives are redirected is as moving as the story of his nurse, who knows that her love can bless a damaged life. . .Anyone would be struck by the extraordinary power and sympathy of The Memory Keeper’s Daughter.”

—The Washington Post

“Absolutely mesmerizing…draws you deeply and irrevocably into the entangled lives of two families and the devastating secret that shapes them both.”

—Sue Monk Kidd

“Kim Edwards has created a tale of regret and redemption… of characters haunted by their past. Crafted with language so lovely you have to reread the passages just to be captivated all over again . . . simply a beautiful book.”

—Jodi Picoult

“Kim Edwards writes with great wisdom and compassion…. This is a wonderful, heartbreaking, heart-healing novel.”

—Luanne Rice

“A heart-wrenching book, by turns light and dark, literary and suspenseful.”

—Library Journal

“A gripping novel, beautifully written. With amazing compassion, Kim Edwards explores the impact of a family secret that challenges the limits of love and redemption.”

—Ursula Hegi

“Gripping from its start. Highly accomplished.”

—The Guardian (UK)

“A remarkable achievement. [Kim Edwards has] clearly hit a nerve.”

—The Independent (UK)

“Masterfully written…a compelling story that explores universal themes: the secrets we harbor, even from those we love; our ability to rationalize all manner of lies; and our fear that there will always be something unknowable about the people we love most.”

—The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“I devoured it.”

—Sena Jeter Naslund

 

 

EXCERPT:

The Memory Keeper’s Daughter Chapter 1

March 1964

The snow had been falling for several hours when 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. As the storm took hold, 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.

After dinner he built a fire, venturing out into the weather for wood he had piled against the garage the previous autumn. The air was bright and cold against his face and the snow in the driveway was already halfway to his knees. He gathered logs, shaking off their soft white caps and carrying them inside. The kindling in the iron grate caught fire immediately, and he sat for a time on the hearth, cross-legged, adding logs and watching the flames leap, blue-edged and hypnotic. Outside, snow continued to fall quietly through the darkness, as bright and thick as static in the cones of light cast by the streetlights. By the time he rose and looked out the window, their car had become a soft white hill on the edge of the street. Already his footprints in the driveway had filled and disappeared.

He brushed ashes from his hands and sat on the sofa beside his wife, her feet propped on pillows, her swollen ankles crossed, a copy of Dr. Spock balanced on her belly. Absorbed, she licked her index finger absently each time she turned a page. Her hands were slender, her fingers short and sturdy, and she bit her bottom lip lightly, intently, as she read. Watching her, he felt a surge of love and wonder: that she was his wife, that their baby, due in just three weeks, would soon be born. Their first child, this would be. They had been married just a year.

She looked up, smiling, when he tucked the blanket around her legs.
“You know, I’ve been wondering what it's like,” she said. "Before we're born, I mean. It's too bad we can't remember." She opened her robe and pulled up the sweater she wore underneath, revealing a belly as round and hard as a melon. She ran her hand across its smooth surface, firelight playing across her skin, casting reddish gold into her hair. “Do you suppose it’s like being inside a great lantern? The book says light permeates my skin, that the baby can already see.”

“I don’t know,” he said.

She laughed. “Why not?” she asked. “You’re the doctor.”

“I’m just an orthopedic surgeon,” he reminded her. "I could tell you the ossification pattern for fetal bones, but that's about it."

He lifted her foot, both delicate and swollen inside the light blue sock, and began to massage it gently. The powerful calyx of her heel, the metatarsals and the phalanges, hidden beneath skin and densely layered muscles like a fan about to open. Her breathing filled the quiet room, her foot warmed his hands, and he imagined the perfect, secret symmetry of bones. In pregnancy she seemed to him beautiful but fragile, fine blue veins faintly visible through her pale white skin. It had been an excellent pregnancy, without medical restrictions. Even so, he had not been able to make love to her for several months. He found himself wanting to protect her instead, to carry her up flights of stairs, to wrap her in blankets, to bring her cups of custard. "I'm not an invalid," she protested each time, laughing. "I'm not some fledgling you discovered on the lawn." Still, she was pleased by his attentions. Sometimes he woke and watched her as she slept: the flutter of her eyelids, the slow, even movement of her chest. Her outflung hand, small enough that he could enclose it completely with his own.

She was eleven years younger than he was. He had first seen her not much more than a year ago, as she rode up an escalator in a department store downtown, one gray November Saturday while he was buying ties. He was thirty-three years old and new to Lexington, Kentucky, and she had risen out of the crowd like some kind of a vision, her blond hair swept up in an elegant chignon, pearls glimmering at her throat and on her ears. She was wearing a coat of dark green wool and her skin was clear and pale. He stepped onto the escalator, pushing his way upwards through the crowd, struggling to keep her in sight. She went to the fourth floor, lingerie and hosiery. When he tried to follow her through aisles dense with racks of slips and brassieres and panties, all glimmering softly, a sales clerk in a navy blue dress with a white collar stopped him, smiling, to ask if she could help. A robe, he said, scanning the aisles until he caught sight of her hair, one dark green shoulder. Her bent head, revealing the elegant pale curve of her neck. A robe for my sister who lives in New Orleans. He had no sister, of course, nor any living family that he acknowledged.

The clerk disappeared and came back a moment later with three robes in sturdy terry cloth. He chose blindly, hardly glancing down, taking the one on top. Three sizes, the clerk was saying, and a better selection of colors next month, but he was already in the aisle, a coral-colored robe draped over his arm, his shoes squeaking on the tiles as he moved impatiently between the other shoppers to where she stood.

She was shuffling through the stacks of expensive stockings, sheer colors shining through slick cellophane windows. Taupe, navy, a maroon as dark as pig’s blood. The sleeve of her green coat brushed his and he smelled her perfume, something delicate and yet pervasive, something like the dense, pale petals of lilacs outside the window of the student rooms he’d once occupied in Pittsburgh. The squat windows of his basement apartment were always grimy, opaque with soot and steel ash, but in the spring there were lilacs blooming, sprays of white and lavender pressing against the glass, their scent drifting in like light.