Without a Map: A Memoir
by Meredith Hall
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Book Reviews of Without a Map: A Memoir
Book Review: Deeply appreciative to the author
Summary: 5 Stars
I picked this book by chance, because I saw it on a book discussion. This is an amazing read!!! Memoir sure beats fiction! Unlike so many who write memoirs, as a pat on the back, Meredith is compelled by some greater personal need to put this in print - a need borne less out of ego than a feeling to honor life and love, something much greater than herself... She is an ordinary person who has lived an extraordinary life... Now what really gets her over the outcasting she endured from family and community as a result of teen pregnancy in 1965-66, what really heals her is having her own two boys later, and then even later knowing the boy she abandoned and who has now grown up to be a very fine young man. Without these three sons of hers, and their love for her and bonhomie for each other, she would not have come round to any semi-reconciliation with her mother, father, and other family members etc. She was long alone - ultimately it was her own brood that brought her back. I admire Meredith very much. What you also have in her, however, is a sensitive soul --- frankly, I think others would have gotten over it. But she came from a good middle-class family, formed by the 1950s social mores, and it was particularly hard on her... Having said that, this book is also an insight on poverty in a state such as Maine. Meredith has such large seeing eyes for the people around her. I regard her as a wise person, like few are, and very compassionate - even taking in an elderly neighbor as a boarder for the last 11 years of his life after his wife dies... One thing I wonder about is her ex-husband, whom she divorced but who gave her two boys. I assume some things just can't be told, out of respect or sensitivity to the living... And yes, she does linger greatly on the pain, but she is a sensitive soul, and as a result has written a tremendous book... The other thing that helped her, besides having three great boys, is going to college at age 40 and getting a degree, in English literature, that helps her make sense of and articulate her life... congratulations, Meredith, God bless...Book Review: Memoir Through Whirligig Eyes
Summary: 5 Stars
Meredith Hall writes "The whirligig [water bug] can synthesize these two distinct realms [above and below the water's surface], creating a cohesive picture of the world above and the world below. I've always envied this ability. Imagine being able to see what is before you and at the same time what lies beneath the surface, the obscured, the unannounced, the threatening.
"I wish that I had had these eyes, had been able to see both realms: what was at the surface and what might lie below, the warning signs. At sixteen I'd held only one view: my mother loved me."
Like Hall, most people have to have the wind knocked out of them before they change their worldview. The lucky ones have someone who comforts them until they're able to breathe again.
Hall isn't lucky...when she is sixteen. She's seduced by an older boy's attention, gets pregnant, and is rejected by her parents, whose worldview won't allow them to do anything else. A girl who gets herself pregnant even their girl)is forever trash. Their family doctor agrees with them. He tells Hall "Don't try to tell me who the father of this baby is. I know you have no idea. Girls like you never do."
How many girls have heard this? How many will hear this?
Age, distance, and writing talent have permitted Meredith Hall to examine her life from above and below, and then relate what she believes contributed to the way she was treated and her inability to change the course of events. It's not all her mother's fault, her father's fault, her own fault, or even society's fault. It's more complicated than simple blame.
Perhaps her readers will borrow her whirligig eyes to look at the lives of people they know. Perhaps their new understanding will breed compassion.
Note: I wouldn't change a word of this memoir.
Book Review: A Poetic Rendering of Profound Grief and Alienation
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a deep, insightful and poignant memoir. Meredith Hall candidly looks back at her adolescence, the painful time that shaped her young adulthood and created a sense of deep existential angst, alienaton from society, and the inability to form intimate relationships with others.
At 16 years of age, Ms. Hall had a child which she gave up for adoption. At the same time, she was no longer permitted to live with her mother and had to move to her father's home where she endured the cold judgment of a passive father and a condemning stepmother. Ms. Hall's live became shame-based and filled with grief. Her days and months were measured by how old her child would be at that time along with her feelings of being an outcast with no place of rest.
As Roethke said "What is madness but nobility of the soul at odds with circumstance." I believe that this quote describes Ms. Hall's situation. She writes a chapter about walking/wandering throughout Europe and Asia - - just walking to try and walk off the shame, grief, dissociation, and displacement. She can not connect with anyone, including herself.
Over time, as Ms. Hall grows into adulthood, she is able to come to terms with her situation, accept her grief and live her life. She has children of her own and meets the son she gave up for adoption. The book describes their relationship. It also describes the difficult and strained relationships that the author has with her parents and siblings throughout her life.
The contents of this book read like poetry. The profound sadness and grief are poetic in their rendering and I was tearful at many points in this beautifully written book. I can not give it a high enough recommendation. The chapter about Ms. Hall's wandering in Europe and Asia is one of the best pieces of writing that I have ever read.
Book Review: A truly "examined life" - Bravo!
Summary: 5 Stars
Wow! And that's a very soft wow, filled with wonderment at this book so bursting with truth and filled with pain, anger and forgiveness. On the surface, this could simply be viewed as a book about a woman who got pregnant at sixteen, gave up her baby, and had a very difficult time of things for the next twenty-five years or more. But, if you dig just a ltlle deeper, this is simply a story of what it means to be fully human, to live a life warts and all and finally try to understand what it all means. Meredith Hall does all this in her wonderful memoir,Without a Map. She presents herself as child, as daughter, as a mother. This is a truly "examined life," and anyone who reads it will relate and will feel richer for having read Hall's story. Here is a tiny sample of what glitters in this story, something that, when I read it, I recognized, as will anyone who has ever lost a parent without having the chance to verify something - that love went both ways. She speaks of a meeting with her father.
"He is eighty-four years old. I have a startling need to unburden my father of whatever guilt or regret he may carry, to say good-bye to him, to tell him I love him. I am afraid that he will die and I will be left with the unending conversation that has hung in the lost time between us all these years. There are many, many things I wish I could say to him ..."
Hall got to have that conversation, the one I never did have with my father. When I read these lines - and others - I wept. For this is a book about family ties - the ones that held and the ones that didn't. It will make you weep. This is a beautiful book, by a woman who has learned things about life the hard way. If Meredith Hall never writes another book, she will be remembered. This one is enough. - Tim Bazzett, author of SOLDIER BOY: AT PLAY IN THE ASA
Book Review: Too redundant, too many feelings
Summary: 3 Stars
While Meredith Hall in "Without a Map" tells a sad, interesting story, I found myself struggling to get through the book. Undoubtedly, she was treated abysmally by her parents and friends when she became pregnant at 16 years old. This family and community "shunning," along with giving up her baby for adoption, stays with her through the course of her life. Very sad, poignant stuff. But, she reminds us, practically every paragraph, over and over, that she is in pain, sad, alone, detached, etc.
There are very interesting, meaty parts of the story. She buys a fishing boat with a boyfriend and fishes through a storm, she walks through Europe to the Middle East with no money, she cares for her mother through a terrible terminal disease. But these moments are dragged down by the over emphasis of her feelings. Meredith also chooses to ignore chronology again and again, and also leaves huge holes in her story - just when we are rivited by her story, she jumps to a whole new part of her life. For instance, one chapter ends with her in the Middle East, broke, practically naked...then, she decides to go home. The next chapter starts and she has two children. How did she get home? How did she meet and fall in love with the father? What changes in this empty person's life to open up to another human and decide to create a new life? It is a mystery.
While there is some good stuff here, and Hall is a talented writer, I found this to be a tedious attempt. I needed more meat, less gravy.