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Without a Map: A Memoir | 
 enlarge | Author: Meredith Hall
Publisher: Beacon Press
Category: Book
List Price: $14.00
Buy Used: $5.53
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Avg. Customer Rating:  53 reviews
Sales Rank: 13817
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.4 x 0.8
ISBN: 0807072745
Dewey Decimal Number: 818.609
EAN: 9780807072745
ASIN: 0807072745
Publication Date: April 15, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Condition: Thank you for looking at Bookscorner1. May have shelf wear and remainder mark.
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Product Description
A New York Times Bestseller and 2007 Book Sense Selection
Meredith Hall's moving but unsentimental memoir begins in 1965, when she becomes pregnant at sixteen. Shunned by her insular New Hampshire community, she is then kicked out of the house by her mother. Her father and stepmother reluctantly take her in, hiding her before they finally banish her altogether. After giving her baby up for adoption, Hall wanders recklessly through the Middle East. She returns to New England and stitches together a life that encircles her silenced and invisible grief. When he is twenty-one, her lost son finds her. Hall learns that he grew up in gritty poverty with an abusive father?in her own father's hometown. Their reunion is tender, turbulent, and ultimately redemptive. What sets Without a Map apart is the way in which loss and betrayal evolve into compassion, and compassion into wisdom.
"Hall emerges as a brave writer of tumultuous beauty."
?Alanna Nash, Entertainment Weekly
"First-time author Hall pens a haunting meditation on love, loss, and family . . . Hall colors outside the lines with this memoir, full of unexpected twists and turns."
?Caroline Leavitt, People (rated 4 out of 4 stars)
"Beautifully rendered."
?Elle (a nonfiction readers' pick)
"A modern-day Scarlet Letter."
?Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times
"A poignant, unflinchingly assured memoir . . . exquisite."
?Robert Braile, Boston Globe
"Meredith Hall's magnificent book held me in its thrall from the moment I began reading the opening pages . . . a fluid, beautifully written, hard-won piece of work that belongs on the shelf next to the best modern memoirs."
?Dani Shapiro, author of Black and White
"An unusually elegant memoir that feels as though it's been carved straight out of Meredith Hall's capacious heart. The story is riveting, the words perfect."
?Lauren Slater, author of Welcome to My Country and Opening Skinner's Box
"Hall's memoir is a sobering portrayal of how punitive her close-knit New Hampshire community was in 1965 when, at the age of 16, she became pregnant in the course of a casual summer romance . . . Hall offers a testament to the importance of understanding and even forgiving the people who, however unconscious or unkind, have made us who we are."
?Francine Prose, O Magazine
"Meredith Hall's long journey from an inexcusably betrayed girlhood to the bittersweet mercies of womanhood is a triple triumph-of survival; of narration; and of forgiveness. Without a Map is a masterpiece."
?David James Duncan, author of The Brothers K and God Laughs and Plays
"Each chapter of Without a Map is polished and elegantly written . . . the structure is shapely and the book yields poignant insights."
?Juliet Wittman, Washington Post
"Hall's memoir, Without a Map, is a devastating story of what happens when a person is exiled from her own life."
?Frances Lefkowitz, Body + Soul
"I'm awed by Meredith Hall's wisdom and integrity, by her gorgeous prose that deepens my understanding of resilience and love, of loss and forgiveness. A courageous and brilliant memoir."
?Ursula Hegi, author of The Worst Thing I've Done
"Without a Map tells an important and perceptive story about loss, about aloneness and isolation in a time of great need, about a life slowly coming back into focus and the calm that finally emerges. Meredith Hall is a brave new writer who earns our attention."
?Annie Dillard, author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and For the Time Being
"Elegant pprosed make Without a Map an evocative, thought-provoking read. But Hall's heartrending candor on love, loss and hope turn this first-time author's book into a one-sided coversation among new friends."
?Jennifer DeCamp, St. Petersburg Times
"A compelling, painful, hopeful story."
?Barbara Jones, More Magazine
"Without a Map tells a stunning story of exile and ostracization . . . Her memoir is a rare and clear glimpse into the social mores of the mid '60s, and reveals the state of shame many families faced when an unmarried daughter became pregnant."
?Liz Bulkley, The Front Porch, NHPR
"An unbelievable read."
?Robin Young, Here and Now, NPR
"Meredith Hall's memoir is so well written that it was hard for me to accept that the book had to end."
?Tina Ristau, Des Moines Register
"Painfully honest and beautifully written . . . Meredith Hall has managed to distill courage from raw pain, and then somehow write this gem of a book about the experience . . . A stunning book . . . You must read it."
?Lola Furber, Maine Women's Journal
"Meredith Hall is like a Geiger counter ticking along the radium edge of these recent decades. She gives us self as expert witness?Without a Map is smart, sharp, and redemptively honest."
?Sven Birkerts, author of The Gutenberg Elegies and My Sky Blue Trades
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| Customer Reviews: Read 48 more reviews...
 An unforgettable memoir October 10, 2008
This is the harrowing tale of a child who was betrayed by her mother and father, and a child who became a mother and then betrayed her own child. The story begins with the sudden loss of everything that Meredith Hall held dear--her parents' love, her home, her place in the community, her school friends--when she was deserted for the sin of becoming pregnant at 16. The memoir is a sustained reflection on how this betrayal played itself out through the rest of her life.
Throughout the book, Hall tries to understand the terrible betrayal of her parents' love, a love bordered by conditions, the most important one being "Thou shalt not bring shame upon us." With startling honesty, she consistently refuses to gloss over, deny, or ignore the consequences of her actions or those of her parents, most notably in her account of the abuses her abandoned son, Paul, suffered at the hands of his adoptive father. Hall never hides from the scars she inflicted on her beloved son, and insists on forcing herself to note the terrible differences between the upbringings her 3 sons experienced--the first child a life of deprivation and fear, the others, lives of love and comfort. There is no possibility of reconciling these facts, nor does she attempt to.
Hall holds all the violent and conflicting emotions together, never allowing the one to cancel out the other--love and rage, trust and betrayal, need and abandonment, loss and guilt. Her writing carries no contradictions, just the paradoxes of a life lived and declared in lines of lyrical beauty, with passages of exquisite beauty, so finely detailed that it hurts to read. It is a testament to Hall's many years of deep reflection and personal honesty that she could sustain this juxtaposing and balancing of opposites without allowing her work to collapse under the weight of the awful emotional overload she has lived through.
Although this memoir makes for compelling reading, it is not always an easy read. To read it is to become immersed in the terrible suffering of an untethered soul seeking love lost. Hall partially finds what she has spent a lifetime looking for when she is reunited with her 21-year-old son, and when she opens her home and gradually her heart to an old man who is afraid to continue living alone after the death of his wife. But in the end this is a book about life and living. Hall succeeds in gleaning wisdom from a grief begun in a betrayal and carried in a wounded heart through her life. She discovers a joy that "lies like a shimmering pond within our grief, the landscape of our lives."
In the end, Hall asks herself if she would choose a different life, if she would forget all the pain. And the answer she gives is surely the only answer possible. "No. Memory remains. The uneasy remembering transforms pain into sorrow, and sorrow into love. There can be no oblivion."
by Edith O'Nuallain
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women
 Too redundant, too many feelings October 1, 2008
While Meredith Hall in "Without a Map" tells a sad, interesting story, I found myself struggling to get through the book. Undoubtedly, she was treated abysmally by her parents and friends when she became pregnant at 16 years old. This family and community "shunning," along with giving up her baby for adoption, stays with her through the course of her life. Very sad, poignant stuff. But, she reminds us, practically every paragraph, over and over, that she is in pain, sad, alone, detached, etc.
There are very interesting, meaty parts of the story. She buys a fishing boat with a boyfriend and fishes through a storm, she walks through Europe to the Middle East with no money, she cares for her mother through a terrible terminal disease. But these moments are dragged down by the over emphasis of her feelings. Meredith also chooses to ignore chronology again and again, and also leaves huge holes in her story - just when we are rivited by her story, she jumps to a whole new part of her life. For instance, one chapter ends with her in the Middle East, broke, practically naked...then, she decides to go home. The next chapter starts and she has two children. How did she get home? How did she meet and fall in love with the father? What changes in this empty person's life to open up to another human and decide to create a new life? It is a mystery.
While there is some good stuff here, and Hall is a talented writer, I found this to be a tedious attempt. I needed more meat, less gravy.
An Indictment of Those Times September 9, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Having read some of the reviews, I get the sense that those born of later generations or those who led sheltered lives have difficulty conceptualizing what it was like for a young girl who found herself in Meredith Hall's circumstances. One review even stated that abortion was not an option. Actually, it was -- a dangerous, often fatal, backstreet option performed mostly by unethical practioners under unsanitary conditions.
Hall's parents were like many of those times but fortunately not all. Some, rather than shun their child and cast her out, tried to help her, but all so secretly, making arrangements for her to go away for "a long visit," or "to care for a sick relative," in a far away town.
Faced with shame and censure by the community, many would react as Hall's did with devastating affects on the girl. Some of the reviewers could not understand why Hall could not just, as we say now, suck it up and move on. I tended to feel that way myself at times while reading the book, but I do understand that not everyone is able to do that. She had lost the love of her parents, and lost the child as well. Those are two heavy losses right there. She also lost the only way of life she had known.
Some reviewers felt that Hall lacked feeling in her telling of her story, not expressing warm emotion in other relationships in her life. I believe rather that the trauma of loss caused feeling to be bottled deeply within, beyond her reach for many years. Perhaps that was what the killing of the chickens was about. I found that to be a highly difficult chapter to read, but perhaps it was an important one. Killing of living creatures with names, seemed to represent the killing of her spirit, all her girlhood hopes and dreams that she had experienced. Laying out their bodies was like laying out all the losses. It was after that that Hall seemed able to finally move on.
People react differently to different experiences. Another book that readers of Without a Map might enjoy is Stolen Fields: A Story of Eminent Domain and the Death of the American Dream a memoir that traces the effects of a catastrophic event through several generations of a family.
Memoir Through Whirligig Eyes July 30, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Meredith Hall writes "The whirligig [water bug] can synthesize these two distinct realms [above and below the water's surface], creating a cohesive picture of the world above and the world below. I've always envied this ability. Imagine being able to see what is before you and at the same time what lies beneath the surface, the obscured, the unannounced, the threatening.
"I wish that I had had these eyes, had been able to see both realms: what was at the surface and what might lie below, the warning signs. At sixteen I'd held only one view: my mother loved me."
Like Hall, most people have to have the wind knocked out of them before they change their worldview. The lucky ones have someone who comforts them until they're able to breathe again.
Hall isn't lucky...when she is sixteen. She's seduced by an older boy's attention, gets pregnant, and is rejected by her parents, whose worldview won't allow them to do anything else. A girl who gets herself pregnant even their girl)is forever trash. Their family doctor agrees with them. He tells Hall "Don't try to tell me who the father of this baby is. I know you have no idea. Girls like you never do."
How many girls have heard this? How many will hear this?
Age, distance, and writing talent have permitted Meredith Hall to examine her life from above and below, and then relate what she believes contributed to the way she was treated and her inability to change the course of events. It's not all her mother's fault, her father's fault, her own fault, or even society's fault. It's more complicated than simple blame.
Perhaps her readers will borrow her whirligig eyes to look at the lives of people they know. Perhaps their new understanding will breed compassion.
Note: I wouldn't change a word of this memoir.
 Could not get into this book. July 3, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Did not like it. Writer seems to bounce from story to story. I could not really get into this book and ended up reading two other books in between. This book will probably end up on my yard sale box:(
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