Word: daughter
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First things first, Kim Edwards is not a Wunderkind. Yes, her very first novel, The Memory Keeper's Daughter (Penguin; 401 pages), has become the literary phenomenon of the summer. Despite its total lack of biblical codes, serial killers or Sudoku, The Memory Keeper's Daughter has just hit No. 1 on the New York Times paperback bestseller list. "It's a thing you almost don't dream about, because it seems so impossible to have it happen," Edwards says, on the phone from her home in Lexington, Kentucky...
...tell her a story about a man in his 40s who discovered that he had a brother with Down syndrome whom he'd never met - the brother had died in an institution before the man even learned he existed. That anecdote became the seed of The Memory Keeper's Daughter, which begins one snowy night in 1964 with the birth of a pair of twins. One is a healthy boy, Paul, the other is a girl with Down syndrome. The doctor, who is also the father, makes a well-intentioned but fateful decision: he gives his daughter to a nurse...
...snap decision, a well-intentioned lie calculated to spare his wife unnecessary grief, instead puts a terrible secret at the center of their life together. "He had wanted to spare her," Edwards writes in The Memory Keeper's Daughter, "to protect her from loss and pain; he had not understood that loss would follow her regardless, as persistent and life-shaping as a stream of water. Nor had he anticipated his own grief, woven with the dark threads of his past...
...took a second chance encounter to start Edwards writing The Memory Keeper's Daughter. She was invited to teach a writing workshop for mentally disabled adults, some of whom had Down syndrome. "I had no idea what to expect," she says. "I had the most wonderful morning. I really enjoyed the group. Some of them didn't write, but they drew. Others wrote wonderful poems. We had a good time. It made a deep impression on me." That day took her back to the story the pastor told her. "I realized that it was perhaps less daunting than...
...Edwards published a short story collection, Secrets of the Fire King, in 1997 (it was a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway prize) and sold The Memory Keeper's Daughter in 2003. It was a mild success in hardcover - it sold well for literary fiction - but nothing like the phenomenon it's become in paperback. "I've been writing seriously for 20-plus years, and getting a certain level of critical acclaim," she says. "I haven't felt like I've been writing in obscurity, let's say that. I felt like I've had an audience for my work...