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 causes Norah, David, and Paul to resent each other in small and large ways as the years go by. As Kim Edwards tracks the family’s development in the shadow of this dark secret, she ultimately suggests that the lies people tell and the secrets they keep from one another—even in hopes of sparing another person pain and suffering—erode relationships until there is nothing real left.
When David Henry makes the decision to send Phoebe away in the arms of the nurse who helped deliver her, Caroline Gill, he believes that Phoebe will be taken to a group home where she can grow up with other people like her, away from the eyes of society—and unable to cause her mother pain, worry, and strife. David’s own sister, June, died as a young girl from a heart defect, and it is this that motivates him to spin a lie so enormous and egregious that it ultimately serves to ruin his life, and the lives of his wife and son. Though David believes he is being generous and benevolent, he is only hurting his family—and himself. David tells Norah that her daughter died at birth, and refuses to let her see the baby—whom he has already pressed into the arms of nurse Caroline Gill, and urged her to take the baby to a home for the incapacitated somewhere out of town.
David’s lie to Norah doesn’t have its intended effect, though—Norah takes the death of the baby hard, and is unable to find happiness with the knowledge that Paul “survived.” She is wracked with grief, and even after a “memorial service” for Phoebe—a service David allows to happen, even knowing that it’s a sham which will keep him from ever revealing the truth—Norah spends the entire novel trying to overcome the grief of having “lost” a child. If David hadn’t acted out of fear and cruelty—or had, at any point in his and Norah’s lives together, revealed the truth—he might have been able to stop the cracks spreading through his marriage and family from deepening.
At one point in the novel, Edwards shows that David does indeed realize, after all, just what his secrets and lies have done to his family. His marriage with Norah is on the rocks; the teenage Paul is distant and moody, hyperaware of his mother’s longing for the daughter she never knew as well as the inexplicable strife between his parents. As David reflects on his choices, Edwards illustrates his thoughts for her readers: “[David] 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.”
David knows that the secrets and lies he’s told have eroded the foundations of his family—and created “wall[s]” between them that can never be broached. Throughout the novel, there are repeated references to things growing, standing, or festering in the middle of the Henry family—vines, walls, and weeds—which symbolize the painful barriers that have grown up because of the silence, mistrust, and unspoken questions born of David’s deceit and dishonesty.
Ultimately, the Henry family dissolves. David moves out, Paul begins acting out and later moves to New York, then Europe, and Norah throws herself into her work, becoming a high-powered and single-minded business owner. Paul and Norah do not discover the truth about Phoebe until after David’s death, when Caroline comes to town to reveal his secrets. By that point, David has gone to his grave carrying the secret which effectively tore his family apart—though it festered and grew first, dividing them for years and rendering them strangers to one another, devastated by their own private pain, fear, and confusion, all of which revolved around the grand lie of Phoebe’s death.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Secrets and Lies ThemeTracker
Secrets and Lies 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.”
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 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.
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.”
It was strange; she disliked him so much for these words, but she felt with him also at that moment the greatest intimacy she had ever felt with any person. They were joined together now in something enormous, and no matter what happened they always would be.
“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.
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.
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.
“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.”
