This morning I finished reading The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, a first novel about a father who gives his retarded daughter away while his wife is still unconscious from the delivery. I admired certain things about it, like the very real and very annoying tendency we all have to hear someone else’s truth and focus on ourselves. The novel’s characters all do that to a fault. One ordinarily self-contained person shares an honest thought or feeling, and the listener automatically says, “What about me? What about my drama?” I also thought The writer did a good job of capturing how we interpret other people’s actions in the framework of our own assumptions about them and about the way the world works. Someone says or does something with one intent. Other characters respond as if something else were meant.
But what was most compelling for me was the father. I was drawn by his motivation and fascinated by his guilt. I was so drawn to him, in fact, that I noticeably lost interest when I realized he would no longer be appearing, and when I became conscious of that loss of interest, I remembered a conversation I had with a friend of mine about how books with happy endings are less satisfying somehow than books that end sadly. I think that’s because happy endings are so much harder to write, happiness so often sounding like platitude, not reality.
For me, this book fell into platitude because I don’t believe that a mother who’s been mourning the death of her perfect daughter for twenty-five years simply accepts the retarded replacement, without wondering what she did wrong or why she was being punished or whichever of the lines from that script that the parents of children with disabilities act out before they learn to love the versions of themselves they never expected to give birth to. I especially don’t believe it from this set of characters—all self-absorbed in the extreme.
The book also gave me the opportunity to reflect on my own writing. The novel has too many little dramatic arcs and small unnecessary complications. For example, the father goes out of town to give a talk. He’s supposed to be gone over night, but instead, he disappears for three days. The family is in a panic and calls the police. When he does come home, he brings an unexpected guest. Later that afternoon, there’s an argument, and the eighteen-year-old son runs away from home, necessitating another call to the police, and the next day, the mother is frantic because she still has the guest in her home, an important business account to maintain, news of her sister’s cancer diagnosis to contend with, an extra marital affair to break off, and her son’s continued absence to worry over. That moment would have been as dramatic (or more) if complicating factors had been trimmed down to one or two problems. The marriage was going badly, so things would have been tense enough if the father had called to say he’d be staying away an extra day or two, then stayed away longer. His coming home with the guest, a character who’s presence doesn’t seem all that necessary to me, is complicating enough. The argument would have happened more or less as it did. And the son (instead of running away, stealing a neighbor’s car, and getting busted for shoplifting) could have just disappeared for a few hours and come home pissed or drunk and made more or less the same scene he had at central booking. The mother could have been just as frantic at the office the next day, stewing over the guest in her home and over the affair she’s breaking off, an important moment in her character’s development. My guess is that this excess of drama comes from an inexperienced writer’s fear that one problem is not serious enough to make the reader understand why a character does one thing or why the action takes a specific turn.
My novel, the literary one, and my novella are retellings of one another. The novella came first. When I wrote it, I didn’t think I’d write anything else, so I felt the need to cram it with every important scene I could think of and to fill it with drama and complications so as to compel the reader. When I wrote the novel, I discovered that some of the scenes in the novella actually belong in the longer work and that the two stories are too similar. At one point, I thought of them as being the same story only one when the protagonist is having a good day and the other when she’s having a bad day. Lately, I’ve discovered that they’re actually two different stories, but I’ll need to do a lot of work on the novella to draw that story out.
Puntitas reads _The Memory Keeper’s Daughter_ by K. Edwards.
