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 year of marriage in a futile attempt to understand what has broken between them. As Paul grows up, he, too spends time lingering in the past as he attempts to imagine what his life might have been like if his sister had not “died” at birth. As the characters in the novel wrestle with the pull of the past, Edwards argues that too much attention to time gone by is dangerous—attempts to keep history from repeating itself as well of the act of lingering in memory will only derail one’s life further.
The members of the Henry family all wrestle with the inexplicable pull the past has on them—but none so intensely as David Henry, the novel’s protagonist. Kim Edwards turns the novel into an exploration of how the past can distort the future—and she uses David as the primary example in her careful character study. David Henry is in many ways both the protagonist and antagonist of the novel—he is trapped in a terrible, lonely world of his own making, created by the horrible secret he engendered when he sent Phoebe away with Caroline Gill. Locked in a constant battle with himself over whether or not he should tell his devastated wife and lonely son the truth about their family—that there is one member, still alive, whom they are missing—David finds himself living almost entirely in the past, pulled again and again to the memory of the night he made the fateful choice that would change his life and his family’s forever.
David’s preoccupation—perhaps even obsession—with the past is symbolized through his late-in-life success as a photographer. Years after Norah gives him the gift of a camera as an anniversary present, David begins honing his skills as a photographer and starts taking pictures (often using Norah as a model) which focus on the unseen, embedding Norah into wide shots that focus on the background and obscure the person in the frame so that they’re just a small part of the picture. David’s obsession with freezing moments in time speaks to his inability to release himself not just from the most pivotal moment of his life—the moment in which he chose to give away Phoebe—but all the moments after, in which he has doubled down on his decision, letting the secret grow and fester. David’s art of erasure also speaks to how he has erased Phoebe from his family—and how he’s unable to forget her, yet has no idea who she’s growing into or what she looks like. Phoebe is the invisible in his life—not seen or felt, but a part of the canvas, lurking just below the surface of everything he does.
It’s important to note that David isn’t just haunted by his recent past. His impoverished childhood, made more unbearable by his sister’s death at just twelve years old from a heart defect, is the root of who he is today. He chooses to give Phoebe away in part because he wants to spare Norah the pain of losing her—being a doctor himself, he’s aware of the risk of congenital heart defects that accompanies Down syndrome—and spare himself the repeated pain of losing someone to heart failure. Ironically, David himself dies of a heart attack towards the end of the novel, demonstrating that no matter how hard people try to escape their pasts, they cannot outrun them forever.
David Henry’s fatal flaw is his simultaneous fear of and obsession with the past. David seeks to keep the past from repeating itself, but cannot live with the choices he makes in pursuit of this goal, and spends nearly his whole life feeling like a prisoner to the memories of his poor decisions, mistakes, and losses. He represents Edward’s larger argument that there are no answers to be found in the past—and spending one’s life obsessed with what’s already transpired only keeps one from enjoying the present and building towards a future.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Memory and the Past ThemeTracker
Memory and the Past Quotes in The Memory Keeper’s Daughter
He cut the cord and checked her heart, her lungs. All the time he was thinking of the snow, the silver car floating into a ditch, the deep quiet of this empty clinic. Later, when he considered this night—and he would think of it often, in the months and years to come: the turning point of his life, the moments around which everything else would always gather—what he remembered was the silence in the room and the snow falling steadily outside.
She too had been shocked by Bree’s nerve, her daring, and she was angry that the rules seemed to have shifted, that Bree had more or less gotten away with it—the marriage, the divorce, the scandal.
She hated what Bree had done to them all.
She wished desperately that she’d done it first.
But it would never have occurred to her. She’d always been good; that was her job.
“He had a sister,” Norah whispered, determined, looking around at all the faces. They had come here out of kindness. They were sad, yes, and she was making them sadder by the second. What was happening to her? All her life she had tried so hard to do the right thing. “Her name was Phoebe. I want somebody to say her name. Do you hear me?” She stood up. “I want someone to remember her name.”
“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.
He took a deep breath, fighting a wave of vertigo, afraid even to glance at Norah. He had wanted to spare her, to protect her from loss and pain; he had not understood that loss would follow her regardless, as persistent and life-shaping as a stream of water. Nor had he anticipated his own grief, woven with the dark threads of his past. When he imagined the daughter he’d given away, it was his sister’s face he saw, her pale hair, her serious smile.
“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.
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.”
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.
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.”
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.
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.”
