Without a Map: A Memoir
by Meredith Hall
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Book Summary Information
Author: Meredith HallEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-04-01
ISBN: 0807072745
Number of pages: 256
Publisher: Beacon Press
Book Reviews of Without a Map: A Memoir
Book Review: An Indictment of Those Times
Summary: 4 Stars
Having read some of the reviews, I get the sense that those born of later generations or those who led sheltered lives have difficulty conceptualizing what it was like for a young girl who found herself in Meredith Hall's circumstances. One review even stated that abortion was not an option. Actually, it was -- a dangerous, often fatal, backstreet option performed mostly by unethical practioners under unsanitary conditions.
Hall's parents were like many of those times but fortunately not all. Some, rather than shun their child and cast her out, tried to help her, but all so secretly, making arrangements for her to go away for "a long visit," or "to care for a sick relative," in a far away town.
Faced with shame and censure by the community, many would react as Hall's did with devastating affects on the girl. Some of the reviewers could not understand why Hall could not just, as we say now, suck it up and move on. I tended to feel that way myself at times while reading the book, but I do understand that not everyone is able to do that. She had lost the love of her parents, and lost the child as well. Those are two heavy losses right there. She also lost the only way of life she had known.
Some reviewers felt that Hall lacked feeling in her telling of her story, not expressing warm emotion in other relationships in her life. I believe rather that the trauma of loss caused feeling to be bottled deeply within, beyond her reach for many years. Perhaps that was what the killing of the chickens was about. I found that to be a highly difficult chapter to read, but perhaps it was an important one. Killing of living creatures with names, seemed to represent the killing of her spirit, all her girlhood hopes and dreams that she had experienced. Laying out their bodies was like laying out all the losses. It was after that that Hall seemed able to finally move on.
People react differently to different experiences. Another book that readers of Without a Map might enjoy is Stolen Fields: A Story of Eminent Domain and the Death of the American Dream a memoir that traces the effects of a catastrophic event through several generations of a family.
Summary of Without a Map: A Memoir
Meredith Hall's moving but unsentimental memoir begins in 1965, when she becomes pregnant at sixteen. Shunned by her insular New Hampshire community, she is then kicked out of the house by her mother. Her father and stepmother reluctantly take her in, hiding her before they finally banish her altogether. After giving her baby up for adoption, Hall wanders recklessly through the Middle East, where she survives by selling her possessions and finally her blood. She returns to New England and stitches together a life that encircles her silenced and invisible grief. When he is twenty-one, her lost son finds her. Hall learns that he grew up in gritty poverty with an abusive father?in her own father's hometown. Their reunion is tender, turbulent, and ultimately redemptive. Hall's parents never ask for her forgiveness, yet as they age, she offers them her love. What sets Without a Map apart is the way in which loss and betrayal evolve into compassion, and compassion into wisdom.Memoirs Books
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