Map Quest
Reading Without A Map made me recall Roger Ebert's comments that the stories of Frank McCourt's memoir Angela's Ashes were honed over years and decades. Certainly Meredith Hall's history, in which a 55 year old recounts her life from age 16 on, is to be read not as a straight out version of events, but a carefully crafted tale that allows the reader, through highlights and specific focusing, to walk with Hall through tumultuous decades of disconnection and the loss and partial return of hope. Where the events end and her interpretation of them begins is uncertain, which is what makes memoirs both true and fictionally interpretive. It is probable that her ex-husband, the only major person in her pained community not to be discussed in her book, would have written a differently slanted book. Nevertheless, Hall gives a powerful memoir, and displays a dexterous use of creative non-fiction to tell her tale.
The book tempts me to critique Hall; she has, after all, opened herself up. Is she too generous of her own faults? Does her father get off too lightly, her mother too harshly? Is she the victim of disconnected wandering, or a protagonist who made poor choices yet overly blames the decisions of other's conditional love rather than herself?
However, at the end of my appraisal, I'd still be thankful that she was able to poignantly write about her life. Her decisions to reconnect with her mother and try to do the same with her father are inspiring.
Over all, the book shows me things I know and try to put in practice: to give unconditional love to my children, to not blame others for decisions caused by my own weakness (i.e. Hall's father), and to see myself as part of a community, rather than naively believing that disassociation heals ancient wounds. But I think that Meredith Hall writes too much about her life without providing an analysis of where she went wrong by her own hand. Her lack of spiritual faith (she mentions going to an Easter service only to celebrate the rebirth of the Earth, p. xvii) allows us to see her life as a sequence of events, rather than an overarching theme of failure, anger, forgiveness and recovery. Her ongoing bitterness with her mother, even as caretaker while her mother died of MS, and her fear of a student's knowing about her long ago pregnancy ("I could not have a student knowing my dark and secret past", p. xiv) show a woman still recovering. It is this painful absence of the spiritual that leads her, in the end, to solitude in a Maine cabin, still searching ("This is an ordinary story, the story of a search for a steady course." p. 220).
Reading Hall makes me want more of her works, and a visit to her website revealed that she has a novel and a short story collection in the works. Yet her prose, while haunting and yearning, can't change an unresolved journey that results from her interpretations and decisions, and not from fate.

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