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The Memory Keeper's Daughter

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The Memory Keeper’s Daughter study guide contains a biography of Edwards, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis. 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.

Those 25 years in American history encompass some of the country’s most important social changes and conflicts, and throughout the novel, there are references to the Vietnam war, the Kent State massacre of 1970 (and the burning of the ROTC building at the University of Kentucky in Lexington in response to the Kent State shooting,) and the education reform of the 1980s. David is desperate to outrun the secret he’s allowed to flourish, but he’s unable to escape the weight of what he’s done to his family.

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. 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. 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. 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. But watching David now, absorbed in his explanation, she understood that he did not really see her and hadn’t for years.

Edwards has stated that she’s drawn to writing about explorations of the past and the long-term effects of lingering secrets. 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. 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. All the striving he had done, all the competitions and awards, the long and futile struggle to both please himself and impress his father—placed next to Phoebe’s life, all this seemed a little foolish too. Norah, his wife, transforms over that period from a “Suzy Homemaker” to the owner of a success of travel agency.And then suddenly the knowledge was hers, irrevocable, searing: all those years of silence, when he would not speak of their lost daughter, David had been keeping this record of her absence.

They’d never really see Phoebe, these men, they would never see her as more than different, slow to speak and to master new things. The lie, though meant to spare his family pain and grief, ultimately becomes the source of its slow, painful dissolution over the decades that follow. It was as if he’d taken pictures all these years since to try and give another moment similar substance, equal weight. He realized, with a deep sense of shame, that his pity for Phoebe, like his mother’s assumption of her dependence, had been foolish and unnecessary.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. He alienates himself from his wife Norah and son Paul, and when he tries to find redemption by sheltering a sixteen-year-old pregnant runaway, Rosemary, he estranges himself from his family even more deeply. This is symbolic of the thematic exploration of the patriarchal devaluation and authoritarian dominance of females in 1964. All the time he was thinking of the snow, the silver car floating into a ditch, the deep quiet of this empty clinic. They were joined together now in something enormous, and no matter what happened they always would be.

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