The Memory Keepers Daughter by Kim Edwards

In this book the father delivers his wife’s two babies at a hospital, but upon seeing that his daughter has down syndrome, he tells the nurse that is working to take the baby away from him and his wife and never speak to his wife about it. He planned to lie and tell his wife that his baby daughter died at the birth. I believe that the author named the book "The Memory Keepers Daughter", because he keeps all of these secrets about his little girl and begins to see as these forbidden memories inside his head and lingering ones in his wife’s tear his family apart.

I think that the thing that is really overwhelming her is not only the grief that she never really got to see her daughter but the fact that she knows somewhere inside of her that her daughter did live. When the dad hit the baby back it cried out as it took its first startling breath, I think that somewhere deep within her sleepy state the wife heard that cry and made her first connection with the baby, listened and somehow registered the first sound her little baby made. That is why I think in all her dreams she is looking for something she lost- she is not grieving over memories she was never able to have- she is tortured by the ones she did.

I also believe that the father is not really upset about his wife, or even the fact that his only son has to be raised by him alone without the help of the mother I think he is so upset over the rash decision he made to throw the precious daughter he could have had that he chose to throw away. My opinion is that he should be the one that is having the dreams of lost things, because to have to lose something you have to be able to posses it first, and though technically the wife did have the baby carried inside her as part of her body, the dad held her in his hands looked over her face, saw her and took her in as part of this world and then in a split second rejected her as ever being there. To me the way he lost something is his sense of reality- because in those few moments the world and time just didn’t exist as she disappeared from his arms. The most haunting thing about this is that no matter where he goes she could a step, a mile, a universe away, and yet the fact that she is hi, that he first one to look at her, to hold her, to know her as phoebe. Again this brings me back to memories and how for his situation the actual reality is much different- in fact the opposite from the wife’s- that though he shred these few tender moments, he is more upset over all the years he lost when he left her. 

To conclude the wife, and the father have had the reality of their states of mind completely wrong and confused and that memories are the most dangerous thing to enter a human’s fragile mind.