Friday, April 29, 2011

Friday Finds

MizB at Should Be Reading hosts Friday Finds. I've had such a busy week that I only came across 1 new find that I'd like to share:

The Memory Palace by Mira Bartok

Bartók’s mother, Norma Herr, was a pianist who suffered from schizophrenia and was homeless for much of her life. When Bartók was a child, her unpredictable mother tried to jump out of a second-floor window. After enduring years of painful uncertainty, Bartók and her sister made the difficult decision to cut off all ties to their mother, with only a post office address as a tenuous connection. They changed their names, too, and had unpublished telephone numbers and addresses. Only after Bartók suffered a debilitating brain injury in an automobile accident and discovered her mother’s stored artifacts were she and her mother able to re-connect. After the accident, Bartók covered her computer with Post-it notes of “things I can’t remember anymore,” yet memories of her childhood fill these pages as images come flooding back and she tries valiantly to make sense of them within a contemporary context that bridges the past and the present. By the time mother and daughter meet again, some 17 years later in 2006, her mother is dying from cancer.

1 comment:

  1. This sounds amazing! I'll definitely have to add it to my TBR list.

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