Without a map : a memoir / Meredith Hall.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hall, Meredith, 1949-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Hall, Meredith--Childhood and youth.

Hall, Meredith.

Authors, American--21st century--Biography.

Authors, American.

Manners and customs.

Maine.

Hall, Meredith--Homes and haunts--Maine.

Maine--Social life and customs--21st century.

Genre:

Biographies.

Physical Description:

xxv, 221 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Boston : Beacon Press, [2007]

Summary:

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, where she survives by selling her possessions and finally her blood. 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. Hall's parents never ask for her forgiveness, yet as they age, she offers them her love. What sets "Without a Map" apart is the way in which loss and betrayal evolve into compassion, and compassion into wisdom.

Contents:

The lonely hunter

Waiting

Stronghold

The uprising

Again

Drawing the line

Without a map

A river of light

Double vision

Killing chickens

Threshold

Propitiation

Chimeras

Reckonings

The river of forgetting

Sojourn

Outport shadows.

ISBN:

9780807072738

0807072737

OCLC:

71146336

Online:

Publisher description