
{"id":392,"date":"2007-06-07T11:25:47","date_gmt":"2007-06-07T19:25:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.carrborocitizen.com\/main\/2007\/06\/07\/book-review-without-a-map\/"},"modified":"2007-06-07T11:35:29","modified_gmt":"2007-06-07T19:35:29","slug":"book-review-without-a-map","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/2007\/06\/07\/book-review-without-a-map\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Without a Map"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>By Erica Eisdorfer<br \/>\nColumnist<\/em><\/p>\n<p>A happy childhood does not a good memoir make. This isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t an original thought, and it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s probably true. It may also be a fact that the worse your childhood, the better the book. Someone else\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s trauma often makes for zesty reading.<\/p>\n<p>Meredith Hall\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s <em>Without a Map<\/em> is, as writer Ivan Doig says, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153bone-honest.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll say. Bony seems like exactly the right word for this book. <!--more-->It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s sharp and spare and unencumbered by any comfortable fleshy padding. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d been popular), her church (she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t yet a legal option, so the author doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t mention it.<\/p>\n<p>After her mother said, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Well, you can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t stay here,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d she went to live with her father, who forbade her from leaving the house (as in, she wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t allowed outside). One scene describes how she, a heavily pregnant girl wearing her father\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s sweater and against his direction, drags the evaporator into the barn and taps the maple trees so that the syrup doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s hard to read on, for feeling it yourself.<\/p>\n<p>The remainder of the memoir is about what happens to a girl in the sixties who\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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 \u00e2\u20ac\u0153adventures\u00e2\u20ac\u009d has an intentional connotation. Hers were wanderings. She wandered, a child-sized hole, as she puts it, in her soul. She\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d never seen her baby; it was taken away the moment it was born.<\/p>\n<p>How do you get back to here from way out there? Somehow, she did. And you pretty much won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t believe what she was willing to do\u00e2\u20ac\u201dhow she was willing to construct and reconstruct her family\u00e2\u20ac\u201dto 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Erica Eisdorfer Columnist A happy childhood does not a good memoir make. This isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t an original thought, and it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s probably true. It may also be a fact that the worse your childhood, the better the book. Someone else\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s trauma often makes for zesty reading. Meredith Hall\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Without a Map is, as writer Ivan Doig&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-392","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellany"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=392"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=392"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=392"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=392"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}