"A brave writer of tumultuous beauty." --Entertainment Weekly
"Beautifully rendered." --Elle
A poignant, unflinchingly assured memoir." --The Boston Globe
This "sobering portrayal" of a pregnant teen exiled from her small New
Hampshire community is "a testament to the importance of understanding
and even forgiving the people who . . . have made us who we are" (O,
The Oprah Magazine)
Meredith Hall's moving but unsentimental memoir begins in 1965, when she
becomes pregnant at sixteen. Shunned by her insular New Hampshire
community, she is then kicked out of the house by her mother. Her father
and stepmother reluctantly take her in, hiding her before they finally
banish her altogether. After giving her baby up for adoption, Hall
wanders recklessly through the Middle East, where she survives by
selling her possessions and finally her blood.
She returns to New England and stitches together a life that encircles
her silenced and invisible grief. Her lost son finds her when he is
twenty-one. Hall learns that he grew up in gritty poverty with an
abusive father--in her own father's hometown. Their reunion is tender,
turbulent, and ultimately redemptive. Hall's parents never ask for her
forgiveness, yet as they age, she offers them her love.
What sets Without a Map apart is the way in which loss and betrayal
evolve into compassion, and compassion into wisdom.
