Without a map
Subtitle: a memoir
By: Meredith Hall
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2007
Place of publication: Boston
Language: eng
Number of pages: 221
ISBN-13: 9780807072738
Subjects: Social life and customs; Homes and haunts; American Authors; Childhood and youth; Biography
Description: "Meredith Hall grew up bonded to her insular New Hampshire community, comforted by the hallmarks of belonging: perfect attendance in Sunday school, classmates who seemed more like cousins, teachers who held her up as a model student, a mother who loved her unconditionally. Then, at sixteen, she became pregnant, and all at once those who had held her close and kept her safe turned their backs." "The same day in 1965 that Meredith was expelled from school, her mother told her "You can't stay here." Her father and stepmother reluctantly offered Meredith a cold sanctuary until she gave birth to the child she gave up for adoption. Then she was banned from her father's home forever. For the next decade she wandered, lost to society and to herself. Slowly, Meredith began stitching together a life that encircled her silenced and invisible grief." "When she was twenty-one years old, Meredith's lost son found her. She learned that he has grown up in gritty poverty with an abusive father - in her own father's hometown. Their reunion was tender and turbulent, a renaissance. Meredith's parents never asked for her forgiveness, yet as they aged, she offered them her love. Without a Map charts an extraordinary path in which loss and betrayal evolve into compassion, and compassion into wisdom."--Jacket.
Table of contents: title: The lonely hunter; title: Waiting; title: Stronghold; title: The uprising; title: Again; title: Drawing the line; title: Without a map; title: A river of light; title: Double vision; title: Killing chickens; title: Threshold; title: Propitiation; title: Chimeras; title: Reckonings; title: The river of forgetting; title: Sojourn; title: Outport shadows.