Matt recommends "Without a Map"

Meredith Hall's first book is an unflinching and unsentimental memoir of the indelible pain she felt as a result of being shunned by her family and community when she was a teenager. In 1965, living in a comfortable, sheltered New Hampshire town, she gets pregnant at the age of 16. Her parents react to her mistake with contempt and disappointment that becomes an icy, profound silence over the course of the pregnancy. Her doctor treats her with open disgust, and her former friends and their families suddenly want nothing to do with her. She describes in simple, direct, and elegant prose the process by which this social death wears away her identity, leaving her adrift and alone, her only companion the baby growing inside her – the baby she knows she will be forced to give away.

Hall tells her story in a non-linear way, so that it jumps from time period to time period, smartly mimicking the capricious nature of memory. She sheds light on the relative peace and comfort of her childhood (which only makes her parents’ betrayal more heartbreaking); she details her poverty-stricken days wandering around Europe and the Middle East, searching for meaning in faraway places after years of emptiness; and perhaps most poignantly, she describes her later life as the struggling mother of “legitimate” sons, and her eventual meeting with the (now adult) son she had to give up. Her themes are heavy, and include the construction of memory and identity, the painful failures of well-intentioned love, and the real difficulty of forgiving or (even harder) forgetting. But “Without a Map” is elevated by the author’s haunting, powerful writing; her intelligent and clear-eyed attempt to mine her life story in order to dig up some wisdom was, to me, absolutely successful, and nearly impossible to put down. (You can also listen to a great interview with the author on public radio’s “Here and Now" by following this link: http://www.here-now.org/shows/2007/06/20070601_2.asp ) Recommended for adults.