Of Time and Memory
My Parents' Love Story
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- 3,99 €
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- 3,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
Don Snyder knew nothing about his mother aside from the terrible fact that she died at the age of nineteen, just sixteen days after giving birth to him and his twin brother. All his life Don had been too shy, too deeply pained to ask his father or grandparents to tell him the story of the lovely girl named Peggy Snyder--what delighted or troubled her, who her friends were, how she fell in love, what cut short her brief life.
But then, nearing his fiftieth birthday and compelled by his father's failing health, Snyder embarked on a quest to find his mother. He traveled many times from his home in Maine down to his mother's small Pennsylvania town to trace her childhood and adolescence. He tracked down Peggy's high school friends, spent time with her teachers, probed the memories of the girls--now elderly women-- who had been her bridesmaids. Detail by detail, Don pieced together the harrowing story of Peggy's final year--her passionate love affair with her husband, the unexpected pregnancy, the sudden illness that consumed her, and the impossible choice she was forced to make.
A heartbreaking, overwhelmingly beautiful book, Of Time and Memory is a story of remembering--and reclaiming--the fragile mystery of a beloved life.
BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from Don J. Snyder's Walking with Jack.
NOTE: This edition does not include photos.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
As a child, Snyder intuited that he was not to probe his father about the past--"a place where the hearse was parked." In this engrossing account of his attempt, at age 47, to piece together the life story of his mother, Peggy, by talking to her family, friends and neighbors, Snyder admits it was "preposterous" that he and his twin brother had never asked certain questions about her or the circumstances of her sudden death, at 19, days after their birth in rural Pennsylvania. He had known nothing of his parents' love story--of the veteran and the prettiest girl in Hatfield, Pa., or of their honeymoon in Manhattan in 1949, 10 months before Peggy died. Snyder, the author of two novels, a biography and a previous memoir, The Cliff Walk, found that his curiosity about Peggy assumed an urgency when he was visiting his ailing father, now a retired minister, in 1997. He unflinchingly plumbs his family's "unremembering," born of a grief so profound it begs the question of complicity in the death of Peggy's memory. This memoir of his discovery process braids earnest, if effusive, ruminations with novelistic passages in which Snyder steps into his mother's consciousness to narrate her story. Some readers may find this fictional approach less an act of devotion than a strange appropriation of her life, since she is not present to forgive errors of fact or omission. But Snyder's painstaking evocation of his emotional odyssey in search of a young woman with extraordinary courage will resonate with most readers.
