The Memory Palace; Mira Bartok

Title: The Memory Palace 
Author: Mira Bartok

Publication Year: 2011
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Edition: ARC
Source: Publisher
Date Completed: 2/11/2011
Setting: Cleveland, Ohio and US
Rating: 4.5/5 stars
Recommend: Yes

The Memory Palace is a compelling and somewhat disturbing book about growing up with a schizophrenic mother.  As children, Mira and Rachel were sisters living in Cleveland  with their divorced mother Norma Herr.  Both parents were intelligent and destined for greatness. Paul Herr was an author whose first book was published in 1961, but alcohol took over his life and he left his wife and children when the girls were just four and five years old. A man who could not rid himself of his own demons, he ended up alone and when he died was buried in a pauper's grave, because his next of kin could not be located.

The story is really more about Norma Herr. She too was destined for greatness.  A child prodigy, a pianist, and even a writer  -- later learned through her journals.  However, at around the age of nineteen she began exhibiting signs of schizophrenia. When the girls were just children, Norma tried to jump from a second floor window.  When strange behaviors intensified, as they routinely did, Mira's grandmother would intervene by making a call, and Norma was often hospitalized.  Norma would often obsess about the lives of her daughters, sometimes calling them as many as fifty times a day. Finally, as adults, the sisters make a painful decision to break free of their mother. They change their names, phone numbers and use a post office box so that their mother is not able to contact them directly.  For Norma, the years that followed were spent at several homeless shelters or on the streets.

It wasn't until some seventeen years later, after Mira suffered a brain injury from an automobile accident, causing her to lose some of her memory, that she and her mother are reunited.  When mother and daughter do meet again in 2006, Norma is dying from cancer, and through various possessions that her mother has stored at a storage locker, images of their past slowly resurface, and much of the story is revealed.

The Memory Palace is a powerful and  unforgettable memoir that is well written, and worth reading. It's a story that makes you think about how  family, although sometimes flawed, it is still family and it is sometimes impossible to escape. Recommended.