THE MEMORY ROOM

Poetic and tragic, a theologian’s debut traces a harrowing course of spiritual and psychological healing as a California woman fights to recover from resurfaced memories of childhood abuse.

Barbara’s ordeal begins after she emerges from being stuck in a darkened elevator, and her life rapidly unravels. No longer able to face her students in the classroom, she retreats to her home, alone and deteriorating mentally and physically until a concerned neighbor gives her the name of a good shrink. Barbara’s sessions with him advance fitfully. After weeks of sitting in silence, not uttering a word, she progresses to the point where she can briefly leave him the pieces of her beloved, broken cello, shattered when, in the depths of her despair, she dropped it over the upstairs railing at her house. And then, encouraged by his patience and sympathy, she slowly and meticulously shares her memories: her father experimenting on her with his set of dental tools; her father burying her under the house, straws left in her mouth for breathing; her mother lifting her from her playpen to set her hands and feet on the opened—and hot—oven door. As she grapples with these and other events in her childhood, however, Barbara also has more positive forces at work on her. Her nosy, good-hearted neighbor, the widow Josephine, involves her in a vastly different life next door. Her former love of gardening and music sustain her unexpectedly as she attempts to recover the life she had. And, above all, the steady stream of postcards from Daniel, whose work has taken him to England but whose heart remains with her, reminds her of other memories of the two of them together, loving memories that may help bring her back from the grip of her brutal past.

Barbara’s saga is powerfully imagined and profoundly insightful, but the novel’s stylistic challenges—frequent snippets of verse interspersed with voices past and present—at times seem excessive.