1.Questions for Kim Edwards from the Canterbury National Women’s Register Reading Group, Kent:   

In the first 20 pages, the characters are referred to as the wife, the doctor and the nurse, rather than their names.   We wondered why this device was used?

I had been thinking about The Memory Keeper's Daughter off and on for about three years before I began to write this novel.  When I eventually began, the first chapter came to me all of a piece - not finished, exactly, but with its essential shape intact - one of those rare times of inspiration.  I didn't consciously plan not to use names, but when I went back later in revision I realized how much I liked the fact that the characters were not named in this first chapter.  For me, it creates a mythic, rather dreamy atmosphere in which these dramatic events unfold.  This allows the reader to enter into David Henry's experience of that night, where he is present in these events as both an actor and an observer.  Later, he remembers the events of this night in the same way, almost as if they were story he was told, or events that happened to someone else.  I wanted this first chapter to be distinct from the rest of the book, set apart - the stone dropped into calm water, from which all the other events of the book ripple.

2.      Have you been entrusted with a secret or have you a particular interest in
          secrets?

One thing I discovered while on tour in the US last summer is that secrets, especially family secrets, are something of a universal.  So many people came up to me after readings to share the most astonishing things that had happened to them or to loved ones, discoveries they'd made as adults that completely altered their understandings of the events of their childhoods.  Even for people without such dramatic revelations in their lives, secrets are compelling.  We've all kept them, and we've all had them kept from us, and I think there's a general fascination with secrets.  In a well-written story, they can propel the narrative quite powerfully in a variety of ways.  I read or reread many books with secrets at their centre, from The French Lieutenant's Woman to Crime and Punishment, as I was working on The Memory Keeper's Daughter.

3.      What were the challenges that you faced when you switched from short story
          writing to longer stories?

For me, writing the novel was very much like writing short stories - I wrote with the same sense of exploration and discovery.  There's something very intuitive and organic about the process of writing fiction for me - the form of the piece takes shape as the story unfolds.  Which is not to say I don't believe in analysis.  I do.  I revise a great deal, both for structure and for language.

Questions for Kim Edwards from the Goldthorpe Reading Group and Castleford Reading Group, Yorkshire

1. We all found Norah a very unsympathetic character in comparison with David. Did
     you also dislike Norah?

Actually, I have tremendous amount of sympathy for all the characters in this novel.  I found them to be very human and complex, full of good intentions and mistakes.  I didn't always agree with what they were doing - that's one of the most exciting things about writing, in fact, when the characters take on their own lives and go unexpected directions.  Yet in any case, I don't think the crucial question in fiction is whether or not a character is likeable.  Characters must, however, be sympathetic; that is, the reader must feel some sort of connection to that character and his or her circumstances and motivations.  Norah, for instance, is a woman born in an era when women's choices were very circumscribed.  She imagined one sort of life for herself and thought she had arranged that life.  However, David's deception created a kind of dark gravity in her marriage.  She knew something was wrong, but she didn't know what.  The only visible loss was the presumed death of her daughter, though her marriage was disintegrating, too.  So, she struggled.   Eventually, she found her way
and became a stronger person.  Not without regrets, perhaps, or costs that were more extensive than she'd imagined.  But writing, I always had a sense of her growth, and I admired her resilience in the faces of losses she could not fully understand.

3. Class seems to permeate this book. Is this a peculiarly English reading of your
     book or is it what you intended?

That's an interesting question.  I grew up in a place that had a great deal of social stratification, and that's certainly true of where I live now, in Lexington, Kentucky.  As a result, I did consider ideas of class, and how those ideas would have influenced the characters, while writing The Memory Keeper's Daughter.

4. The photos of young girls and the adjoining door in Rosemary and Jack's room seem to hint at a darker side of David. What did you intend them to signify?

The photos were intended to signify David's longing for the life he gave up when he handed Phoebe to Caroline, and the way he was haunted, all his life, by the decision he had made at that one crucial moment - a decision he could never set right.  As for Rosemary, David was connected with her by the fact that she knows his secret, and also by the fact that he could help her in ways that he cannot help his more immediate family.   I saw Rosemary as echoing his lost sister, and his lost daughter, and the path in life he did not take.

5. Why didn't Norah try harder to reconcile Paul with his dead father?

I think it's not possible, finally, for one person to reconcile two other people.   Reconciliation comes from within and can't be orchestrated.