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| Without a Map: A Memoir | 
| Author: Meredith Hall
Publisher: Beacon Press
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  55 reviews
Sales Rank: 146083
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 248
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.8 x 1.2
ISBN: 0807072737
Dewey Decimal Number: 818.609
EAN: 9780807072738
ASIN: 0807072737
Publication Date: April 11, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Used, very good with no writing or marks in text.Ships within hours from Charleston, SC. Established seller with nearly 10 years of online history.
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Product Description
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. When he is twenty-one, her lost son finds her. 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.
"Meredith Hall boldly charts one of the bravest of stories, the journey from disrupted youth up through that most tricky and forbidding territory, the family circle. Bone-honest and strong in its every line, this work of memory is a remarkably deep retrieval of its times and souls, thereby reflecting our own."
?Ivan Doig, author of Heart Earth
"This is an unusually elegant memoir that feels as though its been carved straight out of Meredith Hall's capacious heart. The story is riveting, the words perfect. It is rare to read a work that manages to be at once artful and compelling, which for me best describes Meredith Hall's debut work. She is an author who deserves to be widely read. Few people write like this. Fewer still have the courage to live like this – without the comfort of any cliche."
?Lauren Slater, author of Opening Skinner's Box, Prozac Diary, and Welcome to My Country
"Meredith Hall's long journey from an inexcusably betrayed girlhood to the bittersweet mercies of womanhood is a triple triumph?of survival; of narration; and of forgiveness. Her portrait of her own empty bravado collapsing into total psychological and geographical dislocation is one of the most harrowing passages I've ever read. The subsequent turn toward memory and honesty is agonized, profound, and salvific. Without a Map is a masterpiece."
?David James Duncan, author of The Brothers K and God Laughs and Plays
"Meredith Hall is like a geiger counter ticking along the radium edge of these recent decades. She gives us self as expert-witness?Without a Map is smart, sharp, and redemptively honest. "
?Sven Birkerts, author of The Gutenberg Elegies and My Sky Blue Trades
"Meredith Hall's story of loss, shame, and betrayal is also a story of joy, reconnection, and survival; each memory takes us deep to the marrow of sorrow and celebration. A work of extraordinary beauty and grace."
?Kim Barnes, author of In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country
"Without A Map tells an important and perceptive story about loss, about aloneness and isolation in a time of great need, about a life slowly coming back into focus and the calm that finally emerges. Meredith Hall is a brave new writer who earns our attention."
?Annie Dillard, author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
"Think for a moment of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, of banishment, reconciliation, redemption, and you'll get the scope of Without a Map, the new memoir by Meredith Hall . . . An extraordinary tale, made all the more moving by Hall's unsentimental prose and ample heart."
?gettrio.com
"a compelling, painful, hopeful story." ?more.com
"Meredith Hall's magnificent book held me in its thrall from the moment I began reading the opening pages. WITHOUT A MAP is a fluid, beautifully-written, hard-won piece of work that belongs on the shelf next to the best modern memoirs, and yet is in a category all its own. It is a moving example of a difficult life redeemed first through examination, then reflection, then finally?like a rough stone polished until it gleams?into a genuine work of art."
?Dani Shapiro, author of Family History
"Hall, a brave and graceful writer who teaches at UNH, examines her life with wide open eyes and an equally open heart. Even as she wrestles with the grief of many losses?her child, her parents' love and respect, her standing in her community, her identity?she demonstrates the writer's gift of separating from her own experiences, establishing an objectivity that allows her to make meaning for herself and readers."
?Rebecca Rule, Nashua Telegraph
"Open adoptions and connections between birth mothers and their children were not the way of life for a young girl who got pregnant in the '60s. Meredith Hall, in her beautifully written, poignant memoir, tells us what life was like for a naive girl who found herself pregnant and abandoned by her mother and father. This is a tale of loss, of endless traveling in search of an intangible something, and, ultimately, of forgiveness."
?Gayle Shanks, Changing Hands Bookstore, Tempe, AZ
"Hall's sensitive, honest account of her personal odyssey shows one remarkable woman transcending this trauma to become a better, stronger person."
?Wendy Smith, AARP The Magazine
"Hall's life, as depicted in this memoir, was nothing if not two things?difficult and fascinating. With no family, friends or other support system, she took her life into her own hands at an early, tender age, and she fell quite far before finally rising up. The reader gets the benefit of her trials, a gritty view of the world from America to Europe to the Middle East."
?INtake Weekly
"Without a Map tells a stunning story of exile and ostracization. Meredith grew up on the seacoast of New Hampshire and became pregnant at age 16, in 1965. Her memoir is a rare and clear glimpse into the social mores of the mid 60's, and reveals the state of shame many families faced when an unmarried daughter became pregnant."
?Liz Bulkley, Host of "The Front Porch," NH Public Radio
"Appalling and infuriating, yet uplifting and inspiring, Without A Map pulls you into Hall's personal experience of sudden rejection and expulsion from her only sources of sustenance and connection. As an adoptive parent I cried and cheered for her through her exile and return to a very different home. Meredith Hall is a hero of awesome courage and eloquence."
?Frank Kramer, Harvard Book Store, Cambridge, MA
"[Without a Map] is a searing memoir about loss, betrayal, love and, in some measure, reconciliation. It has already brought Hall a celebrity that surprises her: stories in People, Oprah and Elle, an interview on National Public Radio, brisk sales in a crowded marketplace. It is on the extended New York Times bestseller list. What is arresting about this memoir is the world it reveals."
?Mike Pride, Concord Monitor
"Without a Map, is so well written that it was hard for me to accept that the book had to end."
?Tina Ristau, The Des Moines Register
"Painfully honest and beautifully written?Meredith Hall has managed to distill courage from raw pain, and then somehow write this gem of a book about the experience?A stunning book?You must read it."
?Lola Furber, Maine Women's Journal
"Fans of Jeannette Walls' The Glass Castle should take note of Meredith Hall's memoir, heartbreaking and ultimately heartwarming..."
?Mary Cotton, owner of Newtonville Books, Newton TAB
"I'm awed by Meredith Hall's wisdom and integrity, by her gorgeous prose that deepens my understanding of resilience and love, of loss and forgiveness. A courageous and brilliant memoir."
?Ursula Hegi, author of The Worst Thing I've Done
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| Customer Reviews: Read 50 more reviews...
 too much map November 14, 2008
Although this book started with quite a jump and kept me interested, by the middle I was getting too much redundancy. I'm glad this author told her story and shared it as a tool for relationships and to learn from.
Possibly exaggerated October 12, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I really enjoyed reading this book but have wondered if the author has exaggerated a bit for effect. I lived in a small New Hampshire town close to Hampton at the time the book begins. A girl or two in the town became pregnant and there was definite disapproval, but at the same time kindness. No one was shunned by her friends or anyone else, much less her parents. I find it hard to believe that her parents were so stonily unloving at this critical time of need for support and understanding, not to mention help. Maybe, but I doubt it. Her travels sound suspiciously overdone also. Still, it's an absorbing story and a gripping read.
 An unforgettable memoir October 10, 2008
This is the harrowing tale of a child who was betrayed by her mother and father, and a child who became a mother and then betrayed her own child. The story begins with the sudden loss of everything that Meredith Hall held dear--her parents' love, her home, her place in the community, her school friends--when she was deserted for the sin of becoming pregnant at 16. The memoir is a sustained reflection on how this betrayal played itself out through the rest of her life.
Throughout the book, Hall tries to understand the terrible betrayal of her parents' love, a love bordered by conditions, the most important one being "Thou shalt not bring shame upon us." With startling honesty, she consistently refuses to gloss over, deny, or ignore the consequences of her actions or those of her parents, most notably in her account of the abuses her abandoned son, Paul, suffered at the hands of his adoptive father. Hall never hides from the scars she inflicted on her beloved son, and insists on forcing herself to note the terrible differences between the upbringings her 3 sons experienced--the first child a life of deprivation and fear, the others, lives of love and comfort. There is no possibility of reconciling these facts, nor does she attempt to.
Hall holds all the violent and conflicting emotions together, never allowing the one to cancel out the other--love and rage, trust and betrayal, need and abandonment, loss and guilt. Her writing carries no contradictions, just the paradoxes of a life lived and declared in lines of lyrical beauty, with passages of exquisite beauty, so finely detailed that it hurts to read. It is a testament to Hall's many years of deep reflection and personal honesty that she could sustain this juxtaposing and balancing of opposites without allowing her work to collapse under the weight of the awful emotional overload she has lived through.
Although this memoir makes for compelling reading, it is not always an easy read. To read it is to become immersed in the terrible suffering of an untethered soul seeking love lost. Hall partially finds what she has spent a lifetime looking for when she is reunited with her 21-year-old son, and when she opens her home and gradually her heart to an old man who is afraid to continue living alone after the death of his wife. But in the end this is a book about life and living. Hall succeeds in gleaning wisdom from a grief begun in a betrayal and carried in a wounded heart through her life. She discovers a joy that "lies like a shimmering pond within our grief, the landscape of our lives."
In the end, Hall asks herself if she would choose a different life, if she would forget all the pain. And the answer she gives is surely the only answer possible. "No. Memory remains. The uneasy remembering transforms pain into sorrow, and sorrow into love. There can be no oblivion."
by Edith O'Nuallain
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women
Too redundant, too many feelings October 1, 2008
While Meredith Hall in "Without a Map" tells a sad, interesting story, I found myself struggling to get through the book. Undoubtedly, she was treated abysmally by her parents and friends when she became pregnant at 16 years old. This family and community "shunning," along with giving up her baby for adoption, stays with her through the course of her life. Very sad, poignant stuff. But, she reminds us, practically every paragraph, over and over, that she is in pain, sad, alone, detached, etc.
There are very interesting, meaty parts of the story. She buys a fishing boat with a boyfriend and fishes through a storm, she walks through Europe to the Middle East with no money, she cares for her mother through a terrible terminal disease. But these moments are dragged down by the over emphasis of her feelings. Meredith also chooses to ignore chronology again and again, and also leaves huge holes in her story - just when we are rivited by her story, she jumps to a whole new part of her life. For instance, one chapter ends with her in the Middle East, broke, practically naked...then, she decides to go home. The next chapter starts and she has two children. How did she get home? How did she meet and fall in love with the father? What changes in this empty person's life to open up to another human and decide to create a new life? It is a mystery.
While there is some good stuff here, and Hall is a talented writer, I found this to be a tedious attempt. I needed more meat, less gravy.
An Indictment of Those Times September 9, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Having read some of the reviews, I get the sense that those born of later generations or those who led sheltered lives have difficulty conceptualizing what it was like for a young girl who found herself in Meredith Hall's circumstances. One review even stated that abortion was not an option. Actually, it was -- a dangerous, often fatal, backstreet option performed mostly by unethical practioners under unsanitary conditions.
Hall's parents were like many of those times but fortunately not all. Some, rather than shun their child and cast her out, tried to help her, but all so secretly, making arrangements for her to go away for "a long visit," or "to care for a sick relative," in a far away town.
Faced with shame and censure by the community, many would react as Hall's did with devastating affects on the girl. Some of the reviewers could not understand why Hall could not just, as we say now, suck it up and move on. I tended to feel that way myself at times while reading the book, but I do understand that not everyone is able to do that. She had lost the love of her parents, and lost the child as well. Those are two heavy losses right there. She also lost the only way of life she had known.
Some reviewers felt that Hall lacked feeling in her telling of her story, not expressing warm emotion in other relationships in her life. I believe rather that the trauma of loss caused feeling to be bottled deeply within, beyond her reach for many years. Perhaps that was what the killing of the chickens was about. I found that to be a highly difficult chapter to read, but perhaps it was an important one. Killing of living creatures with names, seemed to represent the killing of her spirit, all her girlhood hopes and dreams that she had experienced. Laying out their bodies was like laying out all the losses. It was after that that Hall seemed able to finally move on.
People react differently to different experiences. Another book that readers of Without a Map might enjoy is Stolen Fields: A Story of Eminent Domain and the Death of the American Dream a memoir that traces the effects of a catastrophic event through several generations of a family.
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