Missed Potential: A Few Thoughts on Kim Edwards' The Memory Keeper’s Daughter

I love literary tragedy. Works of literature that depict horrific, catastrophic events or deep devastating psychological portraits of personal destruction. And of course, only unhappy endings truly satisfy me. But the story told most be truly tragic and not just sad. There is a huge difference between tragic and just plain depressing.

Kim Edwards’ The Memory Keeper’s Daughter fits the description of depressing not tragic; an exceedingly sad book in a non-particularly interesting way that does not match its fascinating premise. It is the Winter of 1964 in a middle of a snow storm; an orthopedic surgeon’s wife goes into labor. The obstetrician fails to arrive for the birth; the doctor delivers his own child, a healthy boy. Moments later, he is greeted with the surprise of a second child, a daughter with Down Syndrome. In a rash decision, he gives the impaired baby to his nurse to delivery to a home for mentally retarded children; he then tells his wife that their second child died. Unable to leave the child, the unmarried nurse, who secretly loves the doctor, keeps the baby, moves away and starts her life anew. Now that is a plot with tension and much potential for many exciting plot twists.

The potential remains unfulfilled. Edwards misses all opportunities to create a tension filled book that interweaves the lives of the two babies separated at birth. Instead she fills her novel with a bunch of despicable people who keep secrets, behave badly and evoke little empathy. Dr. David Henry, whose childhood was burdened by his parents’ constant concern and worry for his sickly sister, abandons his daughter supposedly to spare his wife and healthy child the rigors and heartbreak associated with raising a mentally retarded child. His wife, Norah Henry, devastated by the supposed loss of her child becomes an adulterous drunk. Trapped in the mayhem of his parents’ failed marriage, Paul Henry becomes an angry rebellious teenager who is indifferent to his father and behaves poorly. The longsuffering nurse, Caroline Gill is a bit of a heroine figure by saving the unwanted baby, but is she really a hero? She kept a baby from her natural mother. Then, there is title character and impaired child, Phoebe who could have been piece that held this book cohesively together, but she nothing more than a literary device who only appears in a handful of touching, tear-inducing scenes.

The Memory Keeper’s Daughter drags along with all the characters keeping their secrets with little tension that the secrets will be revealed, which makes for a long and boring read. By the time that the big reveal occurs, readers are so beaten down by all the redundancy, introduction of strange, irrelevant characters and uninteresting plot developments that the climax provokes very little emotion. Sadly, the premise of this book is substantially better than the actual book. This is a book that can be skipped and not missed in anyway.