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 Edwards calls into question what it means to be part of a family. She ultimately argues that some of the strongest families are made consciously by people who love and support each other, rather than by people simply born into the same household.
The most potent example of a “made” family within the novel is that of Caroline Gill. After she adopts Phoebe as her own daughter and moves with her to Pittsburgh, she steadily and carefully creates an extended family for herself as the years go by, slowly erasing the loneliness she’s always felt and realizing that she is not “some sort of vessel to be filled up with love,” but instead a person with so much love to give that she unites all kinds of people from all different sorts of places. Caroline intends to make a family with just Phoebe—she feels an intense amount of love for the child, and never once pities, judges, or looks down on her as she grows. As Caroline and Phoebe settle in Pittsburgh, however, the united front of their little family draws in everyone they meet—and together, they build a larger family based on love, respect, and mutual desire to weather the world together.
Caroline takes a job working as nurse and caretaker to Leo, an elderly man whose harsh exterior melts the more he gets to know her. Leo’s daughter, Doro, who hires Caroline and takes a chance on her in spite of her lack of references (due to the fact that she and Phoebe are in a kind of hiding) also becomes charmed by Caroline and Phoebe’s bond—and Doro becomes a sort of sister to Caroline as the years pass by. Caroline eventually marries Al, a trucker she met on the night Phoebe was born. When Caroline and Phoebe were caught in the snow, Al gave them a ride home in his rig. As the years go by, Caroline wonders often where the kind, handsome Al ended up—and one night, on the dark streets of Pittsburgh, he finds her, revealing he has been searching for her for years. Caroline and Al begin a courtship, and yet Caroline rejects Al’s offers of marriage for fear that Phoebe will one day prove a burden to him. When Al heroically helps Caroline through one of Phoebe’s health scares, Caroline becomes convinced that Al is the right man for her—and chooses to add him to her family, assured of his worth and his desire to choose her and Phoebe right back, every day.
Towards the end of the novel, another “made” family emerges—after David Henry visits his childhood home and finds the pregnant, sixteen-year-old drifter Rosemary living there, he invites her to come back to Lexington with him and live with his family. Norah rejects Rosemary outright, believing that David is either in love with the girl or the father of her child. On a psychological level, Rosemary, who is the same age as Paul—and Phoebe, whom Norah believes is dead—reminds Norah of the daughter she never knew. While for David, this fact makes him want to shelter and protect Rosemary as penance for his secret deeds, Norah is unable to cohabitate with the girl. David and Rosemary move out and into a home of their own, where they live together platonically for several years while Rosemary gives birth to and raises her son, Jack, and takes classes. David—through circumstances of his own making —has felt like an outsider in his own family for nearly two decades. The family he chooses with Rosemary and her son is nontraditional and strange, even, but David feels more at home with the two of them than he ever did with Norah and Paul.
In sending his daughter away and breaking apart the family that was born to him, David Henry commits an unspeakable and, by some standards, even evil act. However, as the novel progresses and the far-flung characters within it form and make families based on choice, trust, and mutual respect and love, Edwards shows that true family is made of the people who show up for one another out of love and commitment rather than obligation alone. Blood, goes the old adage, is thicker than water—but The Memory Keeper’s Daughter shows that sometimes, the inverse is true.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Families Born and Made ThemeTracker
Families Born and Made Quotes in The Memory Keeper’s Daughter
When they reached the car she touched his arm and gestured to the house, veiled with snow and glowing like a lantern in the darkness of the street.
“When we come back we’ll have our baby with us,’’ she said. “Our world will never be the same.”
She began to laugh. It wasn’t a normal laugh; even Caroline could hear that: her voice too loud, halfway to a sob. “I have a baby,” she said out loud, astonished. “I have a baby in this car.” But the parking lot stretched quietly before her, the lights from the grocery store windows making large rectangles in the slush. “I have a baby here,” Caroline repeated, her voice thinning quickly in the air. “A baby!” she shouted then, into the stillness.
Caroline thought again of Phoebe, such a loving quicksilver child. A finder of lost things, a girl who could count to fifty and dress herself and recite the alphabet, a girl who might struggle to speak but who could read Caroline’s mood in an instant.
Limited, the voices said. Flooding the schools. A drag on resources and on the brighter children.
Caroline felt a rush of despair. They’d never really see Phoebe, these men, they would never see her as more than different, slow to speak and to master new things.
He had given their daughter away. This secret stood in the middle of their family; it shaped their lives together. He knew it, he saw it, visible to him as a rock wall grown up between them. And he saw Norah and Paul reaching out and striking rock and not understanding what was happening, only that something stood between them that could not be seen or broken.
“She was lucky, I guess; she never had a problem with her heart. She loves to sing. She has a cat named Rain. She’s learning how to weave. […] She goes to school. Public school, with all the other kids. I had to fight like hell for them to take her. And now she’s nearly grown I don’t know what will happen. […] What else can I say? You missed a lot of heartache, sure. But David, you missed a lot of joy.”
Her silence made him free. He talked like a river, like a storm, words rushing through the old house with a force and life he could not stop. […] He talked until the words slowed, ebbed, finally ceased. Silence welled.
She did not speak. […]
He closed his eyes, fear rising, because he had seen anger in her eyes, because everything that happened had been his fault.
Her footsteps and then the metal, cold and bright as ice, slid against his skin. The tension in his wrists released. […]
“All right,” she said. “You’re free.”
Phoebe’s face was falling, tears were slipping down her cheeks.
“It’s not fair,” she whispered.
“It’s not fair,” Caroline agreed.
They stood for a moment, quiet in the bright harsh lights.
Caroline said it again: Phoebe, not dead but taken away. All these years. Phoebe, growing up in another city. Safe, Caroline kept saying. Safe, well cared for, loved. Phoebe, her daughter, Paul’s twin. Born with Down syndrome, sent away.
David had sent her away.
“You must be crazy,” Norah said, though even as she spoke so many jagged pieces of her life were falling into place that she knew what Caroline was saying must be true.
He realized, with a deep sense of shame, that his pity for Phoebe, like his mother’s assumption of her dependence, had been foolish and unnecessary. Phoebe liked herself and she liked her life; she was happy. All the striving he had done, all the competitions and awards, the long and futile struggle to both please himself and impress his father—placed next to Phoebe’s life, all this seemed a little foolish too.
“How?” he asked softly. “How could he never tell us?”
She turned to him, serious. “I don’t know. I’ll never understand it. But think how his life must have been, Paul. Carrying this secret with him all those years.”
He looked across the table. Phoebe was standing next to a poplar tree whose leaves were just beginning to turn, scraping whipped cream off her cake with her fork. “Our lives could have been so much different.”
“Yes. That’s true. But they weren’t different, Paul. They happened just like this.”
“You’re defending him,” he said slowly.
“No. I’m forgiving him. I’m trying to, anyway. There’s a difference.”
