The Memory Keeper’s Daughter

by

Kim Edwards

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Themes and Colors
Secrets and Lies Theme Icon
Memory and the Past Theme Icon
Difference and Prejudice Theme Icon
Families Born and Made Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.

Secrets and Lies

At the heart of the story of The Memory Keeper’s Daughter lies a terrible secret: Dr. David Henry’s choice to send away his daughter Phoebe, born with Down syndrome, while telling his wife Norah that the baby was stillborn. This lie—meant to save Norah, David himself, and their “normal” son Paul, Phoebe’s fraternal twin, from a life of difficulty—ultimately casts a shadow of secrecy, pain, and estrangement over the Henry family, and…

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Memory and the Past

As the secrets and lies within the Henry family deepen, David, Norah, and Paul find themselves retreating more and more often into memory and the past—for different reasons, but all with the same desperate energy. David takes up photography as a way of slowing down and inhabiting moments, in a retroactive effort to understand his own past decisions, while Norah combs through memories of her early courtship with David and their happy first…

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Difference and Prejudice

From David Henry’s startled, almost disgusted realization that his daughter Phoebe has been born with Down syndrome to the nurse at the hospital who, when Caroline Gill brings Phoebe in during an allergic anaphylactic reaction, asks if Caroline would like her to let the young girl simply die, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter is suffused with the pall and poison that prejudice casts over society. Through the character of Phoebe—a slow learner and “late bloomer,”…

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Families Born and Made

When Phoebe Henry is sent away for no reason other than her difference, Caroline Gill—the nurse who helped deliver the child—is unable to leave her at the dirty, understaffed home Dr. David Henry has sent her to, and instead adopts Phoebe as her own daughter. Throughout the novel, as Caroline and Phoebe make a new life together in Pittsburgh while the Henrys remains in Lexington—with Norah and Paul unaware that their family is incomplete—Kim…

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