♪♪ In partnership with the friends of the UNH library.

This is The New Hampshire Authors’ Series from the Dimond Library at the University of New Hampshire.

♪♪ Meredith Hall, in her memoir, shared her story with honesty and insight.

She wrote from the heart and with extraordinary grace.

Readers responded, Without a Map has become a surprise bestseller.

Welcome, author and UNH professor, Meredith Hall.

[applause] [unintelligible] I know.

[applause continues] And they've all read your book, and they've all read your book.

Meredith and I were talking as we were setting up here about the surprise of this, and I wanted to maybe just start with that, that here's your first book, a memoir.

Very personal, very revealing about your life.

And now you're out, you’re telling your story and taking questions, and you're kind of famous.

[Meredith laughs] All of a sudden, how does that feel?

It has been a surprise, and I was not ready for this surprise.

I have to say that it was disorienting for me when, when the book started to have such success, I felt a little bit wobbly.

I felt very exposed.

If this were fiction, it might be a different story.

But as memoir, it's not just the writer and the writer's relationship to audience that is happening, but it's also my relationship to my stories and my stories relationship to the readers.

And so it's a wobbly process for me.

I had to catch up fast too, finding out that more than 200 people were reading my book.

So, and now I like it.

Now, I really decided that this- there is a reason that there has been this extraordinary response to these stories.

I think that we, we are encouraged anyway, to keep our personal stories very personal and to not speak those stories.

Memoir is very tricky territory.

It's a suspect form.

And, a volatile and uneasy form.

And, also, my particular story is a very silent story.

When a girl got pregnant in the 50s or 60, she was told to never speak about it to anybody.

The baby is gone.

Get on with your life.

Shut up.

Keep your mouth closed.

Don't make trouble.

Don't say anything.

Never mention this again.

So these are really explicitly silent stories.

And, I've decided that it's a very good thing to speak these stories.

Awkward and sometimes difficult.

But people are responding to this- this speaking out of these stories.

Well, the prose is so beautiful in this book and I'm going to ask you to read a few times today, and I thought maybe you would read from page 24 to 25.

And it's the I call it the snow angel scene.

It seems appropriate, doesn't it?

Thank you, Meredith.

All right.

I'll set it up just a little bit.

I'm, 16 years old, pregnant.

My mother has kicked me out.

My father and his new wife have told me that I can, The fallback plan is I'll stay with them in Epping in their very old house that they're rebuilding.

But I'm there a great deal of the time by myself because they both travel for business.

And so I'm a 16 year old pregnant girl who has never been away from home overnight, suddenly thrown into a strange community on a back country road in a big, dark, cold house.

And it was an exceedingly lonely time.

I was forbidden to go outside.

I was not allowed outside.

Although my father and his wife housed me, they also secreted me away so nobody knew that I was there during that time.

And I was not allowed to, to go outside where I might be seen.

I've come only with sneakers.

In the musty shed.

I find Catherine's boots I put on mittens and my father's old red hunting jacket and a hat.

I walk out the shed door into the winter storm.

A car rounds the corner slowly on the snowy road.

I stepped quickly back into the shed and pull the door closed.

I wait, listening for cars.

When it is quiet.

I move quickly around behind the shed and cupping my belly in my arms, I start to run before another car drives by.

I have not been outside the house since I came.

The cold wind burns my lungs and throat as I move straight across the field toward the woods.

Snow comes over Catherine's boots, packing behind the loose tongue and soaking my socks.

Everything is still, small gusts of wind make snow eddies.

Stiff weed stems curve down to the ground and etch semi-circles back and forth in the snow.

The rotting plank door to the old cold cellar stands open.

I have heard my father talk about this relic from the old farm, but I have never seen it dug into the hillside, the domed black pit smells of damp earth and mold.

I stand just inside, out of the snow.

I breathe deeply, tasting the sweet decay emptying my lungs of the air.

I have breathed in and out, in and out for weeks in the closed up house.

Turning around, I face the woods.

The falling snow softens the line of trees and the air is sharp and clean.

I cross the pasture, plowing my boots through the snow and crawl clumsily under the old wire fence.

Two cars pass the house, but I feel small and inconsequential in the back fields.

I don't run.

Instead, I lie down at the edge of the woods, looking up through the bare oak and beech branches.

The snow floats here, out of the wind, drifting softly on to me like goose down I am cold.

I press my back into the snow and turn my head to the side, flicking little piles of snow with my tongue.

I remember the coppery taste of the snow.

Its quick melt on my tongue.

There is nothing moving anywhere.

The woods and fields calm me.

Ease the ground swell of dread.

Spreading my arms and legs wide, I slowly sweep a snow angel, remembering for just a moment my childhood gone, life gone forever.

I lie still, my belly rising into the soft light, snow collecting around my eyes, my feet cold and everything perfectly silent.

Thank you.

Creative nonfiction, memoir, diary, I mean, there are so many names for telling our stories and and you're right, people are suspicious about memoir.

Is it true?

How much is a- You know, how much does she remember?

How much does she- and can you talk about that?

I think that the writer brings a narrative self to these stories, and that narrative self, I believe, has a kind of, reservoir of movies.

I think that we retain images and movies that have come with us through our lives.

And I wouldn't make the claim that those movies are absolutely, as things happened.

But they are absolutely as we believe they happened.

And, those movies are very accessible to me.

I have been surprised in talking to people that not everybody feels their memories filed away in that way.

But they- [clears throat] excuse me, these memories are very, very, very clearly detailed.

I see where we are, who said what, where people moved and, they're in snips, in clear snips.

And so for me, it has been a matter of, sort of looking back over my shoulder and, addressing that memory, watching that movie and then recording what I see.

And I think that you can't write memoir without challenging for yourself whether this is actually the way things happened, I do- I personally feel that a memoirist must be absolutely true to what he or she believes happened.

Yes.

Yeah.

I want to have you read a couple more times, but one- and one is on, it’s on page 36 and this passage just broke my heart.

How do you say this lady's name?

Kroehne.

Mrs. Kroehne, it's just a heartbreaking passage.

If you'd read that?

In this chapter, I have, the baby was born in May and given up for adoption.

I was expelled from school as a pregnant girl.

You were kicked out of school and not allowed to return to a public school.

So my mother was faced with trying to find, a- any place, any place from which I could graduate, get a high school diploma.

And she found a place called High Mowing School in Wilton, New Hampshire, which accepted me with the caveat that I would not speak about what had happened to anybody.

I had to attend this school for that year, live among the girls and the boys, and never, mention to anybody what had just happened to me a couple months before.

So there is this binding to silence.

And this is a, a brief passage about my dorm room.

I was put in the only single room as a way to keep me from those nighttime conversations with your- with your dorm mate and, Mrs. Kroehne was the dorm mother or dorm counselor.

Mrs. Kroehne says I can paint my little bedroom.

The girls live on the top two floors of the old barn, among the huge beams and ancient wide boards of the floors and walls.

The cupola rises from the middle of our living room, a square tower with windows letting angular blocks of sunlight lie across the old rug.

My room is tiny, a dormer pushing out onto the slate roof.

The windows are diamond- paned, leaded glass with an old brass catch that doesn't pull them tight.

When it snows, I find a small drift of snow neatly edging the top of my dresser.

My room feels separate from the cluster of double rooms, a different kind of space.

A place where I am kept outside the daily flow of relationships.

But it is the only home I have now, and I attach myself to it.

I paint the plaster walls white, except for the little nook under the sloping roof where my bed fits just perfectly There, I paint the walls and sloping ceiling black.

Mrs. Kroehne is shocked.

She holds me to her bosom, stroking my hair and whispering, my poor girl, my poor, poor girl.

Her reaction surprises and embarrasses me, but this dark corner becomes my refuge.

I say to myself, I am in my black or I want to go to my black.

At High Mowing School, this numbing non place is physical, but it introduces me to a psychological space I will call up for many years to come.

I love my black.

I will say to myself, I cannot see how troubling this must be for the adults watching me at High Mowing.

I feel I am coping pretty well.

I am alive even, some of the time.

But as that black retreat eases my pain, it also erases me.

I am a girl who has left the world.

Luckily, High Mowing gives me a very long tether [Meredith clears her throat] Wow.

As I read your book, I kept thinking about you as writer and as confident adult, successful woman and mother of three boys and your relationship to this girl who really is a character.

She-she’s you, but she's not you.

And did you work- What is your relationship with her?

You seem, you seem to love her very much.

That's a great question.

We all do.

That's a great question.

When I wrote this book, you can imagine that there were times that were tearful and difficult, but surprisingly, not- It wasn't as difficult as you would imagine.

Not as difficult as I would imagine.

I sat down, I wanted to write this.

I was committed to it.

I prowled around all those old memories and pulled this together, and I thought I had done pretty well with it.

I was intentionally isolated in San Francisco doing this writing.

So, that writer's life is a strange and kind of separate thing anyway, but I thought I was doing just fine with all of this, learning some things, but mostly a writer at work.

That's what I was doing.

And, when the book was sold and my editor, Helene Atwan at Beacon Press, said I'm going to read through this and send the the galley back to you, the manuscript back to you.

I had expected that I would spend the summer doing the rewriting, and she gave me the glorious news that she thought I could do the edits in 24 hours.

She said, it's I have very little that I'm going to ask you to do small things here and there.

So I was thrilled.

I thought this was, first of all, a great compliment.

And secondly, it opened my summer up.

So I was really- and I don't like revising.

So this is great.

So I sat down feeling very, excited and very positive.

I remember taking this manuscript and sitting on my couch and putting this on the coffee table, thinking this was going to really be a romp, the finished product.

I was going to be able to enjoy my work.

And instead I bawled for three days.

I cried and cried and cried and cried.

And I didn't understand why.

I finally figured out it was the first time I'd ever read the book in its totality.

I had never started at the beginning and read through, and what I met was a very, very sad girl.

And it was my first meeting of that girl as if she were a girl any of us would like to hug and and help, and that was very difficult for me.

My relationship changed ere that minute.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, I would like you to read one more passage.

There's so many passages.

It was really hard to pick, but there's this one passage I want to get to the joy of the book a little bit.

The sons and and you're reunited with, with Paul.

But there's this wonderful passage where you.

It's on pages 178 and 179, where you s-it begins.

Paul and I get lost in our histories, and you talk about your relationship with him and your relationship with yourself and you.

I mean, you talk about grief and guilt and love and sorrow in a-in about a page and a half and you really get deeply into the complexity of the story.

So for your last reading, would you, would you do that?

Becky's absolutely right.

I'm circling in this passage, really circling and circling the great complexity of this relationship as my son returns to a relationship with me, Paul and I get lost in our histories, each of us a child who has been betrayed and abandoned, each of us carrying mothers, fathers we lose sight of, whose grief is playing out in the circling, churning conversations and outbursts.

I carry my own story every day.

It is my intimate shadow.

When I was very young, when I was in very big trouble, I was abandoned by my mother and then my father.

The harm done has become a bony structure surrounding my life, and I carry its weight.

But now I am the mother.

Whatever I have learned is put to the test with my children.

Do I know how to love, how not to harm, how to protect and defend, how to be sanctuary?

I have believed from the moment I gave birth to Alex and Benjamin, my kept children, that I know the obligations of a mother's love.

My two young sons are growing up inside their trust in me.

I try so hard to be a good mother.

I am safety, tenderness, praise.

But I am also always the child cast out to the world.

A long time ago, I move between the sorrows of my past and an unrelenting will to love my children well.

I am child and I am mother, and I am also guilt.

I am a mother who gave her baby to strangers.

For 21 years, my unnamed child held me hard against the mystery of harm.

I loved him, I longed for him, but I did not protect him.

There is one truth in my son's life.

His mother gave him away.

Whatever griefs and rage and questions of my worth have haunted me through my life.

Here is my child, his chin scarred and his eyes flashing the stories of his own great injury.

Whose griefs are these?

I never intended harm.

I know how to love.

And yet I have not loved well.

Maybe all of us at some time move from our compass point of true north, that place in which we determine to correct the failures done to us, and we circle, waiver, and find our own direction outward in the world to create injury.

The-rhumb lines of navigation are not straight.

The wounded and cast out child.

I hold my abandoned son to me, asking forgiveness for casting him to the world.

And there's the metaphor.

That's the title.

Yes.

Yeah.

The title of the book.

Which came up again and again and again, yeah.

That circling.

Right.

And what I love about the book is how open you are.

I mean, the character- I don't know if in real life you might be not a very nice person.

I don't know.

[audience laughs] But in this book.

[laughter continues] Why do I say these things?

But I really do see you as a character.

I can't really, I can't see you as a person.

I mean, you're a person here with me, but you're also a character in this book, and you know what I mean?

I do I think that- And I- and that Meredith is very open and very compassionate and just very loving.

Someone said you had a capacious, I don't even know that word, a capacious heart that means big.

And it really it- I think the best part of the appeal of the book is that we're getting to know this character, this woman that we really respect and who's who's navigated these very troubled waters.

I don't know, we'll find out what people have to say about it, but thank you, Meredith.

Thank you very much.

Yeah.

[applause] Thank you.

So now comes the fun part.

Where Tracy who-the lovely Tracy has a microphone, and you can ask Meredith questions.

Hi.

I have a comment and a question, and I think my comment will probably be shared by many people here.

When you were 16 and I was reading about you as a young thing, I wanted to mother you.

It broke my heart.

But my question is, since you've become famous and you've shared story with the world, have any of the people who rejected and shunned you, contacted you, and said they were sorry?

That's an interesting question.

My mother is dead, and so if she would like to say anything back to me, she hasn't been able to do that.

If she's unhappy with the book, I don't know about it.

My father is still alive, and I don't know whether he's had contact with the book or not.

I don't know if he knows that it's out there.

My siblings were understandably very anxious about this book, and, very reluctant to read it when it first came out, but finally did and have been very wonderful.

And, they, they have come back saying, this isn't what I thought it was going to be.

This is a story about love, which I thought was okay.

It's a good place for them to be with it.

You remember in the book, I say at one point talking about being shunned by my classmates in Hampton, that I sometimes dreamed over the years of being invited to a reunion.

And I would go and I imagined that I would be dressed beautifully and I would look very professional and very successful, and I would be able to go back among them and say, see, you know, I did okay.

Well, when the book came out in April and, my 40th class reunion was on June 2nd, and I had many people from my class email me and ask if I would come to my reunion, which is a very strange thing.

And I wasn't able to go.

I wanted to and I was on book tour and couldn't go.

And I actually planned to to be there.

I thought it was very warm.

And many, many of those classmates have emailed saying, if I were part of that, I'm sorry, I was just a kid.

I didn't understand what was going on and if I participated, I really regret it.

So that's been an interesting, an interesting part of it.

I wanted to thank you for sharing your life and with all of us, and trusting us with your story.

And second, I'm in complete awe of your courage to open yourself up to that wounded place and let us all in.

I appreciate it a lot.

Thank you very much.

You're welcome.

Thank you.

You know, I don't think that I made the decisions about that.

I think that, I think that if we write, if we decide that we're going to write for the public, we have made the decision that, there can be no slipping around.

You know, if you're going to do it, you're going to do it, and you can decide not to do it.

But if you if you decide you're going to do it, you have to do it fully and completely.

Meredith, when did you identify yourself as a writer?

I went back to college very late.

I've done everything very late in my life.

I went back to college because of a divorce at 40 years old, went to Bowdoin for four years and did some writing there but they have no creative writing program.

They had they offered a couple poetry classes, and Franklin Burrows offered a couple of prose writing courses.

And I took all four of those and loved them.

And, and, won some nice awards because of that work.

But I still I, I would have said, I need to earn a living.

I need to raise my children.

Writing is something other people do.

I- Even at, even at that age?

I never imagined that it was something that I could do and, and, and also would have told you all my life I've wanted to write.

That certainly would have been part of the I- it was sort of a dream identity, but not as-I had no sense Did you, did you you keep journals?

that I had to claim identity.

Did you write?

I used to keep journals, but because of my, intense privacy, I burned them routinely.

I have none of them left.

Burned them routinely.

They're all gone, Write and burn write and burn write and burn.

[Meredith laughs] And so I was very afraid people would find them.

One part of your book that I particularly loved and, and have re-read is the part about your mother.

Part of my work has been to understand the contradiction.

Who was my mother?

She was a wonderful mother.

She really was.

She was, fun and loving and funny and smart and energetic and deeply devoted to her children.

But she somehow thought that it was okay to kick her daughter out.

My sister sometimes will say to me, still in frustration, you know, those were the times, those those were the times.

And I try to imagine what it would take for me to, face one of my 16 year old children and kick them out.

What, what social transgression would it take to make me do that?

So I have to study this woman.

I just have to study her.

What is it about this woman that would weigh so heavily on her?

What was she-the price that she felt she was paying for- My shaming of her in her community was so profound that she abandoned her child over it.

And so I have to work between those two things.

But she was a very I loved my mother very, very much.

She was a very wonderful mother in most ways.

And that's, you know, it's it's difficult.

I think many of us have these contradictions.

We have we struggle with parents who are both this and also this.

First of all, thank you so much.

I was introduced to the essay Killing Chickens, here in New Hampshire in the class for one.

And I remember after reading, I said, wow, that's English I want to learn.

[laughing] And probably everyone will then join me in this question, what is next?

I'm pretty sure you have million stor-stories to say as a nonfiction, but what is next?

I'm really hungry to read more.

[laughing] This is tricky, I think I'm an essayist.

I love the essay form.

I think it's a very, very beautiful and difficult and elegant form, and I love it.

I'm worried that I've told all my good stories, and nobody's going to want to read anything else that I have to say from now on.

So, I'm actually working on a novel and a collection of short stories, but finding very little time right now to do that writing.

I had not understood that, with all the grace of the success of a book, you're you're kept very busy tending to that book for a long time.

So I'm really still very engaged, very busy with this book still.

So fiction?

I'm trying we’ll see.

You can lie.

[laughing] That’s right I can lie, I can- this is my chance to lie!

♪♪ Meredith, thank you so much.

[applause] ♪♪