Review: The Memory Palace, by Mira Bartok

I am a sucker for a good rough-life memoir. Give me three hundred pages of overcoming childhood adversity, throw in some life-threatening events, sprinkle liberally with mental illness and financial hardship, and I'm all in. It's my version of reality TV, classed up a bit.

Unfortunately, for a few different reasons, Mira Bartok's The Memory Palace just didn't do it for me. Certainly, her childhood was pretty horrific, with a schizophrenic mother, frighteningly violent grandfather, and abused grandmother; the ordeals she suffered at the hands of these people were at once heartbreaking and riveting. As adults, Bartok and her sister would both eventually change their names and hide their locations from their mother due to the danger she posed to their personal, professional, and physical lives, reuniting with their by-then homeless mother only on her deathbed. For her part, Bartok describes reliving the caretaker role in other relationships, including one ill-fated marriage, until she herself was in a car accident that necessitated having someone care for her due to brain injury.

As interesting as these events are, however, Bartok is unable to make them gel into one coherent, compelling story. Each detail and event is told as if happening in a void; this is not a story of her life, which contained unique challenges, but rather the story of those challenges in and of themselves. Thus, the reader ends up with less of a connection to Bartok herself, which is a problem in a memoir. I don't know a lot about what went on with her in school, if she had friends, what kinds of conversations she had with people, what her day-to-day adult life was like, and so I went through the book not really feeling like Bartok had allowed me in. Bartok is not an adult fiction writer, and she had a lifetime's practice hiding her experiences from everyone around her, and I wonder if perhaps that perfected secretiveness made it difficult for her to allow the emotional openness that would have been required to make The Memory Palace the story it could have been.

Bartok also seemed to be trying to tell both her story *and* that of her mother, but not filling in enough detail of either story, particularly during her adulthood, to make a connection with either person. For instance, late in the book, she makes us aware via a conversation with her sister that she is dating a poet whom her sister doesn't like because he's unemployed; in the next chapter, a good deal of time has passed, they have been married for awhile, and it suddenly comes out that he's been increasingly showing signs of potential schizophrenia himself - how did it get to that point? Why did she marry this person? We don't know. These details are important in a memoir. If this were fiction, maybe I could give it more of a pass, but this is a real life, and there are real details and answers out there; don't just dangle a carrot like that in front of me and pretend details aren't important, because they are.

This memoir could have been so much better. As it was, I wasn't drawn in enough to even really want to finish it, although I did because I can't stand leaving unfinished books around. Maybe after reading The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls' amazing memoir or living with mentally ill and drug addicted parents, I am completely spoiled. I just know that I wanted more from this story, because I know it's there, but perhaps Bartok simply isn't in a place emotionally, or mentally, to want or be able to fully reveal it.

Rating: one star. Disappointingly unengaging, disjointed memoir of a schizophrenic's daughter.