By Erica Eisdorfer
Columnist
A happy childhood does not a good memoir make. This isn’t an original thought, and it’s probably true. It may also be a fact that the worse your childhood, the better the book. Someone else’s trauma often makes for zesty reading.
Meredith Hall’s Without a Map is, as writer Ivan Doig says, “bone-honest.†I’ll say. Bony seems like exactly the right word for this book. It’s sharp and spare and unencumbered by any comfortable fleshy padding. It’s about how, when she was sixteen, Hall got pregnant the first time she ever had sex and was more or less shunned by her schoolmates (she’d been popular), her church (she’d been a regular) and her parents (who were the center of her world, of course, as she was a child herself). This was the early sixties and abortion wasn’t yet a legal option, so the author doesn’t mention it.
After her mother said, “Well, you can’t stay here,†she went to live with her father, who forbade her from leaving the house (as in, she wasn’t allowed outside). One scene describes how she, a heavily pregnant girl wearing her father’s sweater and against his direction, drags the evaporator into the barn and taps the maple trees so that the syrup doesn’t go to waste. Later, as she stirs the syrup on the stove, the wallpaper falling down around her because of the steam, her desire for her old life is so palpable it’s hard to read on, for feeling it yourself.
The remainder of the memoir is about what happens to a girl in the sixties who’s been through a life-altering experience. This one sold her stuff and hitchhiked around Morocco. In that era, lots of kids who these days would be working on their homework were out in the world doing amazingly dangerous things. Your eyes will pop as you read her adventures. Wait. The word “adventures†has an intentional connotation. Hers were wanderings. She wandered, a child-sized hole, as she puts it, in her soul. She’d never seen her baby; it was taken away the moment it was born.
How do you get back to here from way out there? Somehow, she did. And you pretty much won’t believe what she was willing to do—how she was willing to construct and reconstruct her family—to do it. If what you like is a happy story, then give this book a wide berth. If, however, you believe that a life backlit by pain makes a deeper life, if you believe that in order to hope you have to have suffered some, then step right up to this remarkable tale.