The Memory Palace: A Memoir [Bargain Price] [Paperback]

Mira Bartok (Author)

Book Description

Release date: August 9, 2011

When piano prodigy Norma Herr was healthy, she was the most vibrant personality in the room. But as her schizophrenic episodes became more frequent and more dangerous, she withdrew into a world that neither of her daughters could make any sense of. After Norma attacked her, Mira BartÓk and her sister changed their names and cut off all contact in order to keep themselves safe. For the next seventeen years Mira’s only contact with her mother was through infrequent letters exchanged through post office boxes, often not even in the same city where she was living.

At the age of forty, Mira suffered a debilitating head injury that left her memories foggy and her ability to make sense of the world around her forever changed. Hoping to reconnect with her past, Mira learned Norma was dying in a hospital, and she and her sister traveled to their mother’s deathbed to reconcile one last time.

Through stunning prose and gorgeous original art, The Memory Palace explores the connections between mother and daughter that cannot be broken no matter how much exists—or is lost—between them.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. This moving, compassionately candid memoir by artist and children™s book author Bartok describes a life dominated by her gifted but schizophrenic mother. Bartók and her sister, Rachel, both of whom grew up in Cleveland, are abandoned by their novelist father and go to live with their mother at their maternal grandparents™ home. By 1990, a confrontation in which her mother cuts her with broken glass leads Bartók (née Myra Herr) to change her identity and flee the woman she calls œthe cry of madness in the dark. Eventually, the estrangement leaves her mother homeless, wandering with her belongings in a knapsack, writing letters to her daughter™s post office box. Reunited 17 years later, Bartók is suffering memory loss from an accident; her mother is 80 years old and dying from stomach cancer. Only through memories do they each find solace for their collective journey. Using a mnemonic technique from the Renaissance—a memory palace—Bartók imagines, chapter by chapter, a mansion whose rooms secure the treasured moments of her reconstructed past. With a key found stashed in her mother™s knapsack, she unlocks a rental storage room filled with paintings, diaries, and photos. Bartók turns these strangely parallel narratives and overlapping wonders into a haunting, almost patchwork, narrative that lyrically chronicles a complex mother-daughter relationship. (Feb.)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Bartók’s mother, Norma Herr, was a pianist who suffered from schizophrenia and was homeless for much of her life. When Bartók was a child, her unpredictable mother tried to jump out of a second-floor window. After enduring years of painful uncertainty, Bartók and her sister made the difficult decision to cut off all ties to their mother, with only a post office address as a tenuous connection. They changed their names, too, and had unpublished telephone numbers and addresses. Only after Bartók suffered a debilitating brain injury in an automobile accident and discovered her mother’s stored artifacts were she and her mother able to re-connect. After the accident, Bartók covered her computer with Post-it notes of “things I can’t remember anymore,” yet memories of her childhood fill these pages as images come flooding back and she tries valiantly to make sense of them within a contemporary context that bridges the past and the present. By the time mother and daughter meet again, some 17 years later in 2006, her mother is dying from cancer. Poignant, powerful, disturbing, and exceedingly well-written, this is an unforgettable memoir of loss and recovery, love and forgiveness. --June Sawyers --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Free Press (August 9, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1439183325
• ASIN: B006LWDYXG
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (93 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #28,972 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Mira Bartók is a Chicago-born artist and the author of the critically acclaimed New York Times bestselling memoir, THE MEMORY PALACE which was an ALA Notable Book and won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Best Autobiography in 2012. She is also the author of twenty-eight books for children. Her writing has appeared in literary journals and anthologies and has been noted in The Best American Essays series. She lives in Western Massachusetts where she runs Mira's List (http://www.miraslist.com), a blog that helps artists find funding and residencies all over the world. You can find her at: http://www.mirabartok.com and find out about upcoming events at http://www.thememorypalace.com.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

159 of 163 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Memory Palace - A Unique and Compelling Memoir January 10, 2011

By BookMan

Format:Hardcover

I don't particularly care for harrowing survivor memoirs from children of abusive or mentally ill family members. They almost always come off as sensational, blaming, or whining diatribes, and do we really need another one of those? The good news is The Memory Palace doesn't even come close to falling into that trap. Mira Bartok's story of her relationship with her schizophrenic mother who eventually becomes homeless is at once compelling, compassionate, and possesses some of the most beautiful and lyrical prose I've ever read in memoir. And did I mention it's also a page-turner? However, what really sets this book apart is how Bartok integrates her beautiful artwork into the structure of the book to help recall her past and to bring her authentic story to the page. The Memory Palace is essentially an illustrated memoir that details the incredible bond between mother and daughter, the issue of homelessness, and how we, as a nation, perceive mental illness and disability in our culture. It is a visceral and profound story, and is so much more than a blur of one sensational event after another. This is an artful memoir of an examined life, one that exudes strength, determination, and above all, love. Highly recommended.

67 of 69 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Memory Palace--by Mira Bartok January 8, 2011

By C. Smith

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I wish there were more stars to give this book. It is beautiful and heartwrenching. Through all the heartbreak, trauma, and pain, the love between Mira and her very ill mother prevails. I love that she tells her story in vignettes that include her experiences with travel, education,creative pursuits and other relationships. The artwork is breathtaking and enhances the storytelling perfectly. That she and her sister are able to come full circle and reconcile with their mother in her final days is a tribute to their resilience and unwavering love for each other.

47 of 52 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Meeting of Minds January 6, 2011

By N. Gallo

Format:Hardcover

Ms. Bartók's memoir is an intense revelation of love between mother and daughter that breaks the barriers of mental illness, isolation, desperate measures and accidental injuries. As I read this heart-rending biography I marvel at the survival of such love; loves come and go but one perseveres against all odds. Ms. Bartok travels frequently and these experiences are included with her more profound experiences regarding her mother. This book will appeal to anyone who has ever loved someone with a mental illness, or been separated for long periods from a parent. But a more universal appeal is also here, that of the girl in search of herself as well as her family. She is always ready to try new things, to make unusual efforts on her journey. A beautiful book.

Nadine Gallo
Hadley, Mass.

25 of 27 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars An unsettling look at a brilliant mind torn apart by schizophrenia January 18, 2011

By Julie A. Smith

Format:Hardcover

Although I didn't grow up here, I live in Cleveland now, and this book was set here. I also had a mother who suffered through a nervous breakdown, and what was likely undiagnosed chemical depression, so I was very interested in this book from the beginning.

This is not an easy read. It is a tale of a daughter whose mother's mental illness caused her to only communicate with her mother through a social worker and a post office box. It is a story of her growing up, her worries and her guilt. If, like most of us, you can't imagine children leaving their mother to live homeless in the street while they continue on with their lives, reading this book will bring you a greater understanding of why it may sometimes be necessary to do so. For me, it also highlights the need for some type of reform of our broken mental health care system. When a mentally-ill mother holds a knife to her daughter's throat and is let out of the hospital and sent home on her own the same day, there's a problem. I don't pretend to know how to fix it (if I did, maybe I could run for office), but it definitely needs to be fixed somehow.

The writing ... well, the writing is luminous. The Memory Palace is a house of memories in one's mind where you place pictures of things that will stir your memories, and as she takes us through her own memory palace, Ms. Bartok's words embed themselves in your heart. You feel her quiet sorrow and the embarrassment that she is caused by her mother's illness; her fears when her mother leaves her alone when they're out, saying that she'll be right back, and she never comes back. As she goes through her own battle with a brain injury, it helps her understand a bit more about what her mother must feel with the voices inside of her head battling for dominance....

This is not an "I must finish this all in one sitting" type of book. It's a book that you read in parts and give yourself time to digest before going on to the next. There are excerpts from her mother's journals that give a deeper insight into the brilliant mind that was ruined by schizophrenia. I think that it's the type of book that could win literary awards, and I applaud the author for her strength in putting this story on paper.

QUOTES

Then, outside, beneath the marquee, I see a woman with dark curly hair, pacing, smoking in the thrumming rain. She is alone and muttering to herself. Something about her reminds me of the old lady downtown who wears three coats and asks people on the street for a dime. I run to my mother, even though she could be that lady with the coats, the lady who has no teeth and who talks to her hands. When my mother sees me, she hugs me close.

This will be my purgatory: the knock at the door at midnight, my mother, hair wild as snakes, the sound of sirens and doors slamming shut, the violent rush or arms and hands, my mother placed in restraints and handed over to strangers. And me, sitting in a green room beneath cold fluorescent lights, tapping my foot to a song I played long ago.

As my grandma's Alzheimer's worsened, my mother's surprise visits to my sister and me increased, as did her disappearances to shelters and cheap motels. It was as if she were in training to be homeless. Read more ›

23 of 25 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Thank you, Mira February 5, 2011

By zenhole

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

In 1968, I was married to a beautiful woman who was raised in a family with hidden histories of mental illness. To this day I do not understand all that happened within our own family as a consequence of my wife's schizophrenia, but Mira Bartok's book captured events parallel to those we endured. We had four children who had the greatest mother a child could ever have until her illness surfaced in 1981 and led to her leaving our family when the children were 3,7,10 and 11 years old. Hers was a religious and inaccessible delusion that God was calling her to leave her home and become a bag lady and a prophet to correct the abuses in the Roman Catholic Church.
Although we had family counseling, and the children were most successful in their academic careers, many of their fears and sufferings were never shared and continue to this day to affect their adult memory of their individual childhood experiences.
Last week, their mother told me for the first time in thirty years, what a fine father I had been to them and how sorry she was that she had caused us such trials. It was as if the clouds parted and the sun shone brilliantly through. Certainly, Ms. Bartok's memoire retold a similar revelation. There is hope and her own life and guilty feelings are not the conclusion. It is so helpful for those of us dealing with loved ones suffering from mental illness to hear Mira's story.