A story like that told in The Memory Keeper’s Daughter is the kind of tale that a certain sort of reviewer will inevitably base a negative analysis upon by first pointing out its logical improbabilities before going on to criticize the book because it just simply seems implausible. Cher has an Oscar, Donald Trump became President and Sears, K-Mart and Toys-R-Us all declared bankruptcy within months of each other. The point being that recent history has proved absolutely nothing is implausible and even the most outlandish story is potentially possible. Further to the point: the question that needs to be asked is not whether such events could happen, but whether they could have happened under the precise and specific circumstances presented in the book.
Putting aside as completely irrelevant the fact that the backstory of the novel’s origin lies in a true story conveyed to the author covering the main points of the plot, the entire point of the novel is that it is about the utterly unlikely collision of random acts of fate conspiring to create just the perfect set of circumstances which lead to an admittedly implausible outcome. Rewrite The Memory Keeper’s Daughter by setting it in the present day, taking away the freak snowstorm, altering the family history of a main character and acknowledging contemporary treatment of Down Syndrome and, yes, absolutely, the story stretches the limits of one’s suspension of belief. Which is exactly why all those random acts of fate are in there. Because, truthfully, not all of them are random.
The knee-high March snow in Lexington, Kentucky? Totally off the wall. David deciding to knock his wife out completely during the process of delivering her baby with anesthesia? Absolutely not random at all, but a fact of life for millions of women in 1964. Caroline being so overcome by the deadness of the “institution” with which she planned to abandon the newborn baby? Again, a fact of life in 1964. A husband actually, truly and with conviction deciding that not raising a “mongoloid” baby likely to die of heart disease while still a young child was an act of love intended to spare his wife and the baby’s twin brother future unbearable grief? Here’s a clue: the callousness of the title characters of Mad Men was not just a case of carrying dramatic license to extremes.
Everything that might be considered implausible about the events of the narrative need to be considered within the context of the period of time covered by the story. That is exactly why it stretches from 1964 to 1989. It is not just a story of unfair treatment of a little girl born with a birth defect. The Memory Keeper’s Daughter paints upon a much broader canvas a tale of empowerment, overcoming the odds, and proving the worthiness of an entire section of the population deemed in 1964 to have come into the world with a birth defect: being born a woman.
