A Thanksgiving Book Review: The Memory Palace by Mira Bartok

The Memory Palace: A Memoir

One summer evening on my drive home, I was tuned into Fresh Air and I heard Terry Gross interview the writer and artist Mira Bartok about her memoir called The Memory Palace. Mira’s mother had schizophrenia and eventually became homeless as Mira and her sister were unable to help her or care for her.  I promptly ordered the book and threw it into my beach bag for a nice day of laying out in the sun.  Sooo the wrong choice.  I mean it’s definitely not odd for me grab a book about mental illness or homelessness and think, “oh yeah, beach reading, that’ll be perfect.”  So it wasn’t really the topic, except that it was.  The Memory Palace is a really moving and personal account of Mira and her sister’s struggle to grow up with a mother with debilitating mental illness and the equally difficult process of dealing with the fact that they simply could not take care of her at risk of their own safety and sanity.  I was laying on my beach towel, tears streaming down my face reading this book.  It’s very well written and engaging, and while it is moving, it’s not saccharine or sentimental because it is Mira’s real experiences, not some imagined version of the story.  The memoir also delves into memory and how memories are formed, reconstructed and preserved as Mira experienced a traumatic brain injury in a car accident that severely damaged her short term memory.

I highly recommend it as an interesting read, and for another perspective on homelessness.  The travesty that is our mental health care system lets people slip through the cracks all the time.  The current presiding policy: Better to let ten mentally ill people became homeless (or worse, think Jared Lee Loughner or James Eagan Holmes) than take away the civil liberties of one person who is mentally competent.  The stigma that still overshadows all mental health care doesn’t help either.  However, all of this is somewhat besides the point this Thanksgiving Day. 

I know Thanksgiving is almost over and we (myself included) are about to go gorge ourselves again, this time our consumerist tendencies, but let's try to hang onto some of that Thanksgiving spirit as we arm wrestle over the last Tickle Me Elmo - oh wait that was 1996. Well, over whatever toy kids "have" to have this year.

Here's the parting thought from The Memory Palace to see you through Black Friday and through the holidays.  One thing Mira talks about in the book is that knowing her mother was out there on the street, but not knowing where she was, changed the way she viewed homeless people.  She found that she began to give some of the homeless people she encountered food or water, thinking, “I hope someone is doing this for my mother right now.”  That experience humanized the homeless for her.  A thought I have since tried to hang onto when I pass by a huddled figure on the sidewalk or in the park, though it is not easy and I still mostly fail.