The most potent symbol throughout The Memory Keeper’s Daughter is that of photography—cameras, poses, and pictures. When Norah gifts David a camera for the first wedding anniversary they celebrate following the birth of Paul and the “death” of Phoebe, David begins what will become a lifelong obsession with photography, and eventually a mercurial but successful career as a lauded artist. David’s preoccupation with the art of taking photographs stems from his desire to return to the most fateful moment of his life—the moment in which he chose to give Phoebe away. David is obsessed with the fact that one moment has changed the fate of his family forever, and though he knows that at literally any time he could reveal the truth and change the course of his life again, he chooses instead to retreat into memory and try to freeze moments of the past rather than focus on changing the future. David maintains that he doesn’t use photography to “escape the world,” but instead to linger in moments he enjoys. He wants to capture as many happy moments as he can, in hopes of obscuring the one moment most painful to him. As a symbol of retreat into, lingering within, or selectively remembering the past, photography ties in with the novel’s major themes of memory, secrets, and lies.
Photography Quotes in The Memory Keeper’s Daughter
“Please don’t be sad. I didn’t forget, Norah. Not our anniversary. Not our daughter. Not anything.”
“Oh, David,” she said. “I left your present in the car.” She thought of the camera, its precise dials and levers. The Memory Keeper, it said on the box, in white italic letters; this, she realized, was why she’d bought it—so he’d capture every moment, so he’d never forget.
“Put the camera away,” she said. “Please. It’s a party, David.”
“These tulips are so beautiful,” he began, but he was unable to explain himself, unable to put into words why these images compelled him so.
“It’s a party,” she repeated. “You can either miss it and take pictures of it, or you can get a drink and join it.”
“I have a drink,” he pointed out. “No one cares that I’m taking a few pictures, Norah.”
“I care. It’s rude.”
The photographs they were discussing were all of her: her hips, her skin, her hands, her hair. And yet she was excluded from the conversation: object, not subject. […] She had tried, by posing for David, to ease some of the distance that had grown between them. His fault, hers—it didn’t really matter. But watching David now, absorbed in his explanation, she understood that he did not really see her and hadn’t for years.
His life turned around that single action: a newborn child in his arms—and then he reached out to give her away. It was as if he’d taken pictures all these years since to try and give another moment similar substance, equal weight. He’d wanted to try to still the rushing world, the flow of events, but of course that had been impossible.
For a long time Norah sat very still, agitated, on the edge of knowing. And then suddenly the knowledge was hers, irrevocable, searing: all those years of silence, when he would not speak of their lost daughter, David had been keeping this record of her absence. Paul, and a thousand other girls, all growing.
Paul, but not Phoebe.
Norah might have wept. She longed suddenly to talk with David. All these years, he’d missed her too. All these photographs, all this silent, secret longing.
Paul reached out into the hot, humid air, feeling as if he were standing in one of his father’s photographs, where trees bloomed up in the pulse of a heart, where the world was suddenly not what it seemed. He caught a flake in one palm; when he closed his hand into a fist and opened it again, his flesh was smeared with black. Ashes were drifting down like snow in the dense July heat.
Photography Symbol Timeline in The Memory Keeper’s Daughter
