Without a Map by Meredith Hall, like most recommendations from the staff at Quail Ridge Books, not only didn't disappoint...it left me speechless and touched on a deep emotional level. Ms. Hall's memoir begins in 1965 with her shunning by her small community when she committed the unspeakable sin of getting pregnant. She grew up in this community, attended school with the same kids for years, assumed she would be wearing a cap and gown with them in a couple of years. In a small town in 1965, there was no such thing as choice, there was just shame and blame. When her condition became evident, she was expelled from school without the opportunity to complete her studies or graduate. Her mother banished her to live with her father where she was not allowed to leave the house for fear that someone would see her condition. She was given no choice but to put the baby up for adoption.
The title, Without a Map, refers both to her extensive travels over the next years as she struggles to define herself in the volatile world of the 1960's as well as the alienation that she felt having experienced something she didn't expect and about which she couldn't even talk to anyone. The title also lets you in on the nature of the storytelling...moving from her pre-pregnancy life with her mother to her later travels in Europe and the Middle East to her literal "confinement" during her pregnancy, to her later life with her children. The transitions feel right, feel fluid and don't leave the reader wondering what comes next. It makes you feel akin to the author, traveling along with her without a map, learning how her experience shaped her life, feeling her anger, feeling her disillusionment, feeling her unfathomable love for the very people who banished her.
It is shocking to me that a mere 40 years ago a teen pregnancy would be handled as Meredith Hall's was, the adoption done privately and possibly a little unethically....my opinion. She was treated with derision by every adult she encountered, including her doctor. Her life is reduced to a cautionary tale of what happens to "bad girls" who succumb to "scared sex on a foggy Labor Day night."
With no teen mother role models and no comforting support groups, Meredith makes her way, unapologetically doing whatever she can to give her life a sense of meaning despite the fact that the loss of her baby never made sense to her and was never her choice. Some of her choices surprise you and some make you want to put a blanket around her shoulders and hug her close to you.
I don't know if I have ever read a book that so beautifully intertwines the emotion, the narrative and the style to envelope you in the world in which it takes place. I found my eyes filling with tears as emotions welled up inside me because she crept into my soul. But this is not a sentimental or martyrish tear-jerker. In the end, it is a woman playing with the hand she is dealt and building a life that she can live with. Wonderful!
Di
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