This powerful memoir by Meredith Hall is the kind of work that you read on two levels. On one, you are actually experiencing the words, reflecting on their meaning, recognizing yourself in them. And on the other, you are continually amazed and grateful that the book exists.
With Hall, it almost wasn’t the case, not just because she experienced a traumatic adolescence and spent much of her young adult life—in effect—trying to die, but also because as an older adult she’s rarely had the resources needed to sit and write. Thanks to a grant from A Room of Her Own (a foundation that support women writers), a scholarship to Bowdoin (from which she graduated at 44), and her own resilient spirit, Without a Map was born into the world.
So was Hall’s baby, at 16, and then promptly stripped from her and never spoken about again among her family (except in moments of shame and rage). Once the darling of her town, Hall becomes an outcast, abandoned by her own mother and eventually disowned by her own father. The memoir follows her through the turbulent 60s—a political time that matched her inner angst, on her travels through the middle east where she wasted away into almost nothing, and then as she resurrects her life in her own image.
I don’t want to give away too much, but suffice it to say that this woman’s journey is totally ordinary and, at the same time, extraordinarily moving. And her writing, well, see for yourself:
Maybe all of us at some time move from our compass point of true north, that place in which we determine to correct the failures done to us, and we circle, waiver and find out own direction outward in the world to create injury. The rhumb lines of navigation are not straight.Grief coming to wisdom. Wisdom is impossible without reckoning with a past.
Whatever else may have gone wrong, whatever of grief and loss is carried by each of us, so too is love. Nothing is lost.
Next week: Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin.
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Meredith Hall came to speak at my school and I thought she was phenomenal. Her self-assurance was a wonderful thing to watch, especially in the face of rather annoying teachers who kept questioning her on minutiae and overlooking her broader message. She really is an inspiration.
How is this "Not Oprah's?" It sounds like exactly the kind of book Oprah likes to plug: a story about a strong woman overcoming oppression and hardship.
By the way, I'm going to be very, very mad if this one is a fake.