The Memory Keeper's Daughter

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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. 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. 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.

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. Phoebe was standing next to a poplar tree whose leaves were just beginning to turn, scraping whipped cream off her cake with her fork.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.

David lost a sister, June, to heart failure in childhood and, knowing the medical risks associated with Down syndrome, he fears having to watch Phoebe die too. 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.

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. He caught a flake in one palm; when he closed his hand into a fist and opened it again, his flesh was smeared with black. They were joined together now in something enormous, and no matter what happened they always would be. 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. If you want to know more or withdraw your consent to all or some of the cookies, please refer to the cookie policy.

Norah, his wife, transforms over that period from a “Suzy Homemaker” to the owner of a success of travel agency. Accordingly, David sends Phoebe away with nurse Caroline Gill and constructs a terrible lie, telling everyone that Phoebe died at birth. 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.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 lie, though meant to spare his family pain and grief, ultimately becomes the source of its slow, painful dissolution over the decades that follow. His life turned around that single action: a newborn child in his arms—and then he reached out to give her away. 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. 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.