The Memory Palace

Multiple Levels of Wonderful

There have been a number of reviews that discuss the content of The Memory Palace, which is indeed rich with the story of struggle, of survival, and of finding one's way out of a quandary that is as difficult as any brought to Solomon. How does a person navigate a life away from, yet intertwined with, a damaged, gifted, brilliant mother who surely loves you? Bartok shows us her navigation through murky nightmares of living with a profoundly mentally ill loved one. She shows her heart rending decision to let her mother go; those of us who have experienced similar decisions marvel at her courage. The way in which Bartok manages to keep a loose tether to her mother, while creating a full artistic life for herself is one the strongest aspects of this book.
The other thing that makes this an outstanding book is its structure, one that requires the reader to look beyond the surface of the book. Bartok's illustrations, and chapters beginning with her mother's letters are deftly juxtaposed with the narrative of her own travails and travels.
There are points at which the narrative abruptly changes, and for a moment you think that that you might have missed something. I find this one of the book's strengths. One of the brilliant parts of the book, the occasional abrupt change of scene where people and places seem to disappear from the narrative, is clearly one of the books strengths, marking it as a work of literature. I see this occasional disjointedness as a literary technique, a brilliant one.
I love this aspect of the narrative, for the few missing pieces seem to mimic the disjointed nature of the writer's life and the literal dislocations described in the book.
Also, it seems to me that the style of writing perhaps mirrors Bartok's cognitive processes while recovering from her traumatic brain injury. Now, I could be reading a bit into this, but there is something of the abruptness of the change, of scene, of work, of lovers, of lands, that in technique, mimics what is happening in the writer's life.
This is an important book. This is a brilliant book, and while completely different in terms of genre, it reminds me of some of the best contemporary long poems wherein the occasional gap and juxtaposition makes the work enjoyable and memorable.
Read the book; savor it; ruminate over it after you are done. A wonderful read!

9 out of 11 people found this review helpful.

Thank you for writing this book.

I have been reading books of this genre, perhaps searching for a way to reconcile my own feeling towards my own mother and her mental illness. I have read Glass Castles, Hopes Boy and now The Memory Palace. Well written, I literally "felt" this book. In the end Ms. Bartok gave me a gift, the ability to accept, understand and let go. Thank you.

7 out of 7 people found this review helpful.

BookHounds

I had never heard of a Memory Palace before and found that the title for this book fits perfectly. A Memory Palace is created by creating an Escher like space in your brain to link memories to pictures. Mira Bartok uses her mentally ill mother's belongings and journals to create a Palace and takes you through her childhood based on the objects of her mother that are found in a storage container. This memoir is probably one of the best I have ever read and I am amazed that the author keeps a sense of humor, honor and dignity while relating this tale.

Bartok's mother has suffered with schizophrenia for all of her life and after the author and her sister move out and her home is sold, she spirals downward into homelessness. No matter how much Mira and her sister try to get their mother help, it never works. This becomes so heartbreaking and the grief is evident and yet, Mira tries again and again. When that fails, the girls move away, leave no forwarding address and change their names to escape the nightmare their mother has become. They do reunite when her mother is on her death bed.

I really recommend this one and while it is a difficult read at times, it is worth the effort. I received this book from the publisher at no charge for my honest review.

3 out of 4 people found this review helpful.

A Beautiful Memoir

Mira Bartok uses her lyrical prose, keen sense of wonder and detail, and gorgeous artwork to describe her heartbreaking story of life with a beautiful, brilliant, but deeply mentally ill mother. The achingly delicate balance she strikes between fear, love, and compassion will stay with you as you savor every word of her story. This is a complicated told in a loving and understanding way. Beautiful!!

3 out of 4 people found this review helpful.

To those lamenting Bartok "abandoning" her mother and

To those lamenting Bartok "abandoning" her mother and passing judgement, you obviously read this book for entertainment purposes. It must have been nice to come home after school and find cookies and milk waiting for you. After being beat up and ruthlessly tormented by classmates, I came home to a mother crushing her head between her hands screaming for the brainwashing waves to stop. The only safe place I had was a shelf in a linen closet. You may call it abandonment, I call it survival and commend Bartok for her resiliency.

2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

A Mother Abandoned

It is inexcusable how the author and her sister abandoned their mentally ill mother to pursue their own interests. Norma, their mother, pleaded for help, but they changed their names and kept their addresses a secret. They had no contact with their mother for 17 years. Mira questioned her mother's whereabouts, what she was wearing in the cold, where she was living, what she was eating - but she never came in contact with her, even the day she went incognito to the home Norma was living. She wanted to see the home, but not her mother. It was not until her mother was dying in hospice that the author and her sister finally came to spend time during their mother's last days.

This book, although very well written, was more like a novel. I did not need a history lesson of the different places Mira went to live. The book brought tears to my eyes of how selfish and self-centered two daughters can be and how they can toss their mother aside when she so desperately needed moral and physical support.

2 out of 3 people found this review helpful.

THE MEMORY PALACE IS AN INSPIRATION & A MUST-READ

The Memory Palace is brilliant and also an amazing piece of writing. Spiritual, inspirational, beautiful, and heart-wrenching, I can only say what an incredible book it is. Mira is one of two sisters challenged by their schizophrenic, yet brilliant mother, Norma. Mira and her sister are resourceful, thoughtful, angry at times and forgiving. They are fabulously resilient. Mira does her best to portray her mother's brilliant, intense side and makes it clear that that coincided with her mental illness. This is a remarkable, provocative, stimulating book.

2 out of 3 people found this review helpful.

The Memory Palace - A brave story

The author really put herself out there telling the true story of growing up with a mentally ill mother and their eventual seperation until she finds out that her mother is dying. Loved the book

1 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

This is the touching story of a child who grew up in the shadow of mental illness until finally she felt forced to run away and assume a new identity to escape her mother's madness, the madness of Schizophrenia.

It is a story of enduring love and devotion, which although sometimes brought into question, was always evident. Mira begins this memoir in her voice as the child, Myra, her real name. The prose is lyrical, almost poetic at times, and it makes you feel comfortable. There were moments when you could almost feel as if you were a witness to the events, as in the final scene of her mother Norma's dying days, which had a great emotional impact. There were other times, however, when there was an absence of the emotional tug that would make you feel completely captivated. With the help of her mother's diaries and other memorabilia that she has found in a UHaul storage facility, Mira has reconstructed the shattered remnants of the many lives that influenced her growing up. Using fragments of her own memories and recollections that stem from paintings and drawings she once presented to her mom, plus sentences from letters she and/or her mom wrote to each other long ago, during the long period of their separation (17 years), Mira opens a window onto the world of neglect and abuse that was her childhood and allows us to glimpse the sadness and chaos that surrounded her life. Always ready to protect herself from her mother's voyages into her fantasies, she is constantly on guard, but also, she is ever mindful of her mother's needs and the "absence of her actual presence", in her life. Abandoned by their father, raised by a schizophrenic mother forgotten by society, surrounded by superstitious and abusive relatives ashamed of Norma's mental illness, Mira and her sister (Natalia, aka Rachel) muddled through their lives until their mother's violence forced them to abandon her, move away and assume new identities. After a catastrophic car accident leaves Mira with her own brain injury involving memory loss and confusion, Mira begins her own journey back to "normal". In trying to reconstruct her life and its memories which have been lost, admitting that some memories may or may not be parts of her real memory, she tries to create a palace in her mind of rooms filled with memories that will trigger others and make her past life more complete. Like her mother, now she has difficulties remembering, but she is strongly attached to the real world and her mother is not. The bonds between herself and her mom were never severed completely, but they were distant and charged with fear and resentment because of her mom's erratic and dangerous stalking behavior. Perhaps she had to run away.perhaps her sister did too, but perhaps they could have done more, while they were gone, to guarantee their mother's safety, rather than simply think it was the responsibility of the state to take care of her and, therefore, justify their own escape. We can not really know the answer having not walked in those shoes, and surely it would be better if there were services available to help people in such devastating circumstances. The one thing that was completely obvious, throughout the telling of the memoir, was the deep bond between Norma, the mother, and Myra, the child, and even Norma the daughter and her own mother as well, who cared for her, albeit resentfully sometimes, until she was no longer physically or mentally able. That bond between mother and child was never broken.

1 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

A book with several layers, highly recommend.

Thoroughly enjoyed this book. As someone in the field of mental health I loved how Mira Bartok illustrated the complexities of how mental illness can impact the family system and an individual's life. Beautifully told.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

a luminous life, richly & strangely rendered

I am not, in general, a great fan of memoir necessarily, preferring novels, poetry, and philosophy as offering a fuller, richer voice, but Mira Bartok's Memory Palace is that rare memoir that is constructed so compellingly and is so richly reflective that it amply repays repeated visits to its many rooms. On the one hand, as with many memoirs about difficult lives, this one too pulls you through the first time with that sort of heart-in-the-mouth sense of "What next...?" And indeed, as no doubt many a book group will be this year, many reviewers have been compelled by and responded primarily to the harrowing details of the lives it chronicles. But Bartok's triumph is that her book is so much more than that. On the one hand, it is a lyrical demonstration of the way beauty and creativity can not just redeem an otherwise difficult life by providing an escape but make that life itself treasured and irreplaceable. In this regard one of the most compelling aspects of Bartok's palace is its generosity: because each 'room' or chapter structures itself not just around an illustration of Bartok's but also an excerpt from her schizophrenic mother's hauntingly brilliant, fractured, sometimes even funny journals, furthermore pairing these two with a fragment of some beloved, illuminating quotation from another author and an introductory meditation of Bartok's on memory itself, the rooms themselves are brilliantly expansive rather than the narrow, airless retreats one so often finds in memoir. Thus the memoir's poignancy comes from the way her palace becomes not just a refuge for her own memories but for the strange, troubling beauty of her mother's mind and life. Moreover, by her method, each room in its own right becomes compelling and individual; as many reviewers have noted, you find yourself wanting to read each chapter separately and slowly, to better savor and ponder its riches. Indeed, I often found myself breaking off my reading to go re-read individual poems or philosophical passages that her chapters reminded me of, and I think many readers will find themselves doing the same -- Bartok's writing is so expansive that it almost invites you to hang your own memory-pictures on the walls of her capacious chapters, even if a reader's experiences have been very different from Bartok's own. In my own case - and this brings me to "the other hand" -- one reason I so quickly read the book when it came out was that Bartok's story has some similarities to my own family's, and I have already bought and sent copies not just to all my other family members but to friends too who grew up with difficult parents. Bartok's account makes clear on every page that the way to healing is not through a sense of grievance [the flaw of so many memoirs!] and its concomitant anger, accusation, or self justification but through our larger capacities to embrace and celebrate the mysteries of our loved ones and ourselves and the way that even great suffering and fear can birth such unexpected beauty. Overall this book most reminded me of Shakespeare's haunting song from The Tempest: "nothing of him that doth fade, but doth suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange." In Bartok's case, this passage applies not just to her mother (for whom this whole book is the most resonant of death knells) but to her own sea nymph life and even more to the creativity and breathtaking beauty of the soul that refuses to be trapped and contained.

1 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

THe Memory Palace

Mira has spent most of her adult life hiding from her schizophrenic homeless mother when she gets a call through a friend that her mother is in the hospital dying of stomach cancer. When she finds a key to a storage locker that her mother rents, she finds artifacts from her childhood and memories start flooding back. With this memoir Mira has written a captivating story of a childhood filled with hope and fear. She reads from her mother's journals and opens the reader's eyes to what it is like to live in such a world. This is a book of love and forgiveness and finding truth. I recommend you keep a box of tissues close by.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

Interesting read

Interesting.

This book beautifully explains what it's like to live with a sev

This book beautifully explains what it's like to live with a severely mentally ill family member. Each person copes differently in order to survive. I feel less alone after reading it and am thankful to the author for writing it. I've recommended this book to every person that has asked what schizophrenia is really like.

Good not great

I feel like it was a good story line just not as well written as it could have been. Still good though

"The Memory Palace"

Boring and slow moving.

0 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

Five stars on the book but one star for the author and her sister

I was deeply saddened by reading the memory palace. How could the author and her sister in good conscience abandon their mother who cried out to them for help. They left their mentally ill mother who loved them deeply to pursue their own lives and careers. To say this is what theirr mother wanted is ludicrous. They return after shunning her for seventeen years only to reunite when the poor soul is dying. I will rate this book as five stars for the literary content only. All i can say to the author and her sister is that it is a good thing neither had children that would abandon them.

0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

A nightmare experience imposed on the innocent.

This is a disturbing story of the wreckage mental illness has on the lives involved. The emotional toll that this family experiences is frightening. There is no help or hope for those exposed and the emotional damages are permanent. A mother and two little girls walk through a nightmare called life.

Couldn't put it down!

Anyone who's read The Glass Castle will find The Memory Palace just as compelling.

Recommend

Very intense, brought back some memories of my own.