The Memory Palace
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Narrated by:
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Hillary Huber
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By:
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Mira Bartok
About this listen
National Book Critics Circle Award, Autobiography, 2012
When piano prodigy Norma Herr was healthy, she was the most vibrant personality in the room. But as her schizophrenic episodes became more frequent and more dangerous, she withdrew into a world that neither of her daughters could make any sense of. After being violently attacked for demanding that Norma seek help, Mira Bartok and her sister changed their names and cut off all contact in order to keep themselves safe.
For the next 17 years, Mira's only contact with her mother was through infrequent letters exchanged through post office boxes, often not even in the same city where she was living. At the age of 40, Mira suffered a debilitating head injury that left her memories foggy and her ability to make sense of the world around her forever changed. Hoping to reconnect with her past, Mira reached out to the homeless shelter where her mother was living. When she received word that her mother was dying in a hospital, Mira and her sister traveled to their mother's deathbed to reconcile one last time.
Norma gave them a key to a storage unit in which she has kept hundreds of diaries, photographs, and mementos from the past that Mira never imagined she would see again. These artifacts triggered a flood of memories and gave Mira access to the past that she believed had been lost forever.
The Memory Palace explores the connections between mother and daughter that cannot be broken no matter how much exists - or is lost - between them. It is an astonishing literary memoir about the complex meaning of love, truth, and the capacity for forgiveness within a family.
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Editorial reviews
Mira Bartok explores the ideas of survival, family, truth, and forgiveness in the haunting literary memoir of a woman reconstructing her past and examining her relationship with her paranoid schizophrenic mother.
Hillary Huber brings lyricism and good pacing to the book. This super prolific narrator performs a wide variety of books, including the vampire series The Midnight Breed and several mysteries. Huber nails the mother’s voice and underscores the compassion and love that Bartok had for her talented and loving mother, who was ravaged by mental illness.
Bartok, an artist and children’s book author, began The Memory Palace after a car accident impaired both her long-term and short-term memory. She writes with an artist’s eye, creating keen visuals. The narrative gets bogged down in places, but the story is always made interesting by the weaving together of excerpts from Bartok’s mother’s letters and journals, her own artwork and travel experiences, and conversations with her sister. Bartok describes the secrets she kept as a child of a paranoid schizophrenic and what she gained and lost from living with her talented, loving, and very ill mother. Eventually, her mother became so violent and disruptive to her life that Bartok made the excruciating decision to change her name and not allow her mother to know where she lived. This act of self-preservation colored the next 17 years of her life. As Bartok makes her way in the world, her mother’s absence looms large, even in the far-flung places she travels, from Israel to the Norwegian Arctic.
With the success of Angela’s Ashes and The Glass Castle, memoirs of painful childhoods have become very popular. The Memory Palace distinguishes itself by its richness peppered with art, music, and cultural explorations. Strong writing by Bartok and a thoughtful performance by Huber combine for a fine listen, particularly for memoir fans, literary fiction followers, and those with an interest in mental illness. Julie MacDonald
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Story
The best stories pull readers in and keep them turning the pages, eager to discover more—to find the answer to the question: "And then what happened?" The true hallmark of great literature is great imagination, and as Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio prove with this outstanding collection, when it comes to great fiction, all genres are equal.
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Something for Everyone
- By Nicole on 05-24-17
By: Neil Gaiman - author/editor, and others
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The Great Spring
- Writing, Zen, and This ZigZag Life
- By: Natalie Goldberg
- Narrated by: Natalie Goldberg
- Length: 7 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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What does it take to have a long writing life? Drawing on her years of writing, teaching, and practicing Zen, Natalie Goldberg shares the experiences that have opened her to new ways of being alive - experiences that point the way forward in our lives and our writing. The "great spring" of this book title refers to the great rush of energy that arrives when you think no life will ever come again - the early yellow flowering forsythia, for example.
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An enjoyable insight
- By Leigh A on 05-22-23
By: Natalie Goldberg
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A Three Dog Life: A Memoir
- By: Abigail Thomas
- Narrated by: Abigail Thomas
- Length: 4 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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When Abigail Thomas’s husband, Rich, was hit by a car, his brain shattered. Subject to rages, terrors, and hallucinations, he must live the rest of his life in an institution. He has no memory of what he did the hour, the day, the year before. This tragedy is the ground on which Abigail had to build a new life. How she built that life is a story of great courage and great change, of moving to a small country town, of a new family composed of three dogs, knitting, and friendship, of facing down guilt and discovering gratitude.
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Eloquent & Honest
- By Sara on 09-30-15
By: Abigail Thomas
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All the Lives We Never Lived
- By: Anuradha Roy
- Narrated by: Vikas Adam
- Length: 11 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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From the Man Booker Prize-nominated author of Sleeping on Jupiter, The Folded Earth, and An Atlas of Impossible Longing, a poignant and sweeping novel set in India during World War II and the present day about a son’s quest to uncover the truth about his mother....
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Beautiful book
- By Sonia S. on 12-13-19
By: Anuradha Roy
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Priestdaddy
- A Memoir
- By: Patricia Lockwood
- Narrated by: Patricia Lockwood
- Length: 10 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Father Greg Lockwood is unlike any Catholic priest you have ever met - a man who lounges in boxer shorts, who loves action movies, and whose constant jamming on the guitar reverberates "like a whole band dying in a plane crash in 1972". His daughter is an irreverent poet who long ago left the church's country. When an unexpected crisis leads her and her husband to move back into her parents' rectory, their two worlds collide.
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Terrible narration--read, don't listen
- By Penelope on 08-06-17
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After Visiting Friends
- A Son's Story
- By: Michael Hainey
- Narrated by: Dan John Miller
- Length: 8 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Michael Hainey had just turned six when his uncle knocked on his family's back door one morning with the tragic news: Bob Hainey, Michael's father, was found alone near his car on Chicago's North Side, dead, of an apparent heart attack. Thirty-five years old, a young assistant copy desk chief at the Chicago Sun-Times, Bob was a bright and shining star in the competitive, hard-living world of newspapers, one that involved booze-soaked nights that bled into dawn. And then suddenly he was gone.
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Son's Search for Father Brings on Self-knowledge
- By sheila kehoe on 08-15-13
By: Michael Hainey
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Habibi
- By: Naomi Shihab Nye
- Narrated by: Christina Moore
- Length: 5 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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For 14-year-old Liyana Abboud, life in St. Louis, Missouri is perfect. She loves shopping in the nearby stores and walking down streets where she knows everyone. Even better, she has just had her first kiss. But her father is moving the family to Jerusalem - the land where he was born. Suddenly Liyana finds herself a stranger in a threatening world.
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Very good Performance
- By Muhammad on 04-07-15
By: Naomi Shihab Nye
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They Left Us Everything
- A Memoir
- By: Plum Johnson
- Narrated by: Pilar Witherspoon
- Length: 8 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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After almost 20 years of caring for elderly parents - first for their senile father and then for their cantankerous 93-year-old mother - author Plum Johnson and her three younger brothers have finally fallen to their middle-aged knees with conflicted feelings of grief and relief. Now they must empty and sell the beloved family home, 23 rooms bulging with history, antiques, and oxygen tanks. Plum thought, How tough will that be? I know how to buy garbage bags. But the task turns out to be much harder and more rewarding than she ever imagined.
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Thought provoking
- By Margaret on 05-02-17
By: Plum Johnson
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The Probable Future
- By: Alice Hoffman
- Narrated by: Susan Ericksen
- Length: 11 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Women of the Sparrow family have unusual gifts. Elinor can detect falsehood. Her daughter, Jenny, can see people's dreams when they sleep. Granddaughter Stella has a mental window to the future - a future that she might not want to see.
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Nice, gentle story for when you feel bad.
- By Anonymous User on 05-28-17
By: Alice Hoffman
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Autumn
- By: Ali Smith
- Narrated by: Melody Grove
- Length: 5 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Fusing Keatsian mists and mellow fruitfulness with the vitality, the immediacy, and the color hit of Pop Art, Autumn is a witty excavation of the present by the past. The novel is a stripped-branches take on popular culture and a meditation, in a world growing ever more bordered and exclusive, on what richness and worth are, what harvest means.
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Incredible use of language
- By Mary on 03-06-17
By: Ali Smith
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The Blind Assassin
- By: Margaret Atwood
- Narrated by: Margot Dionne
- Length: 18 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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For the past twenty-five years, Margaret Atwood has written works of striking originality and imagination. In The Blind Assassin, she stretches the limits of her accomplishments as never before, creating a novel that is entertaining and profoundly serious. The novel opens with these simple, resonant words: "Ten days after the war ended, my sister drove a car off the bridge." They are spoken by Iris, whose terse account of her sister Laura's death in 1945 is followed by an inquest report proclaiming the death accidental.
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Good book, TERRIBLE audio!
- By Whitney on 04-27-09
By: Margaret Atwood
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Without a Map
- A Memoir
- By: Meredith Hall
- Narrated by: Kathe Mazur
- Length: 9 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Meredith Hall's moving but unsentimental memoir begins in 1965, when she becomes pregnant at sixteen. Shunned by her insular New Hampshire community, she is then kicked out of the house by her mother. Her father and stepmother reluctantly take her in, hiding her before they finally banish her altogether. After giving her baby up for adoption, Hall wanders recklessly through the Middle East, where she survives by selling her possessions and finally her blood.
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Not Your Average "16 and Pregnant"
- By Susie on 12-11-12
By: Meredith Hall
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One True Thing
- By: Anna Quindlen
- Narrated by: Christina Moore
- Length: 9 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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A young woman sits in jail, accused of the mercy killing of her dying mother. She didn't do it, but she thinks she knows who did. In the last months of her life, Ellen Gulden's mother revealed startling secrets that challenged everything Ellen believed about her family. Now, in jail, Ellen believes those secrets will tell her who had the courage to end her mother's suffering.
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Quindlen's writing skills shine in One True Thing.
- By Bonny on 08-26-13
By: Anna Quindlen
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Grief Cottage
- By: Gail Godwin
- Narrated by: Jacob York
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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The haunting tale of a desolate cottage, and the hair-thin junction between this life and the next, from best-selling National Book Award finalist Gail Godwin. After his mother's death, 11-year-old Marcus is sent to live on a small South Carolina island with his great aunt, a reclusive painter with a haunted past. Aunt Charlotte, otherwise a woman of few words, points out a ruined cottage, telling Marcus she had visited it regularly after she'd moved there 30 years ago because it matched the ruin of her own life.
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Character story or ghost story ?
- By RueRue on 12-18-17
By: Gail Godwin
What listeners say about The Memory Palace
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
- Pamela Harvey
- 01-15-11
Eat Pray Love plus schizophrenia
I wanted to like this book more, but it was difficult. It's almost as if writing as an art form is the wrong medium for a "memory palace". A visual expression would be more suited - perhaps a construction or installation of some kind. Bartok's emphasis, bordering on obsession, with objects and their description, became tiresome after a while, and I kept wanting to get back to what I thought was the real story - the untreated schizophrenic mother and her two daughters and how they dealt with this situation.
It's a sad commentary, though, on the dilemma centering on mental illness and how our institutions treat those afflicted. There is such a taboo on involuntary hospitalization, and perhaps that is as it should be. No official authority should take away a person's liberty, even if that person is ill. The only constraints are if that person becomes a danger to oneself and/or others. But many who could benefit from treatment never admit they are ill, nor do they receive any treatment, and continue to make life a living hell for their families.
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8 people found this helpful
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- Linda
- 11-18-12
Maybe one to read rather than listen...
What would have made The Memory Palace better?
This title would have been better with a different narrator. The reader was so overly dramatic that i could not even finish the title.
Would you be willing to try another book from Mira Bartok? Why or why not?
Yes! I am curious how this book progresses, but after 4 hours of the narrator I gave up on it. The story was great, I'd like to finish the book...heading to the library.
What didn’t you like about Hillary Huber’s performance?
The performance seemed like a bad acting extra on law & order or a drama student who, at first, over acts. She was also very slow!
What reaction did this book spark in you? Anger, sadness, disappointment?
Anger! I just wanted the narrator to read the story! A little inflection and character is ok, but this was too over the top.
Any additional comments?
I suggest a sample listen before purchasing. I will be doing this from now on!!
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1 person found this helpful
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- C Douglas
- 01-11-23
Missing something for me.
I grew up similarly, and while we're not all the same, I felt this story was missing something. I'll leave it at that.
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- Kindle Customer
- 10-16-18
Written by the parasitic antagonist
Can't imagine abandoning anyone, let alone a family member, like the girls did for 17 years. Myra seems like an intense narcissist, who puts her own creative interests above all else .I'm glad Myra's exploitation of the situation made her so much money.
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- Mishka Haznor
- 05-09-12
A little less than expected
What could have made this a 4 or 5-star listening experience for you?
After hearing rave reviews on NPR, I was excited to have a chance to read this book. It didn't feel as personal and as unique of a look into the mind of a schizophrenic and or individual highly influenced by being brought up by one as I anticipated. Although, Mira did go into detail about many experiences she had with her mother, I still felt like I needed to hear more in order to have a well rounded view of their relationship and the disease. I am not sure what else to say, other than it felt like she was holding back, and I gathered/felt how disconnected she was from her mother more than anything else.
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5 people found this helpful
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Overall
- amanda
- 03-28-11
Awful book
This book starts off with the author saying that she was in an accident which made her lose her memory. I'm thinking, how was she able to remember things to put into this book? Right away the credibility was lost. The book was boring and never took direction to a story. The reader was good though. She was the only thing that kept me listening for as long as I did. I ended up only getting to chpt. 5 and then just downloaded another one.
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4 people found this helpful
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- tlc
- 03-05-14
Could not finish
What was most disappointing about Mira Bartok’s story?
The story was random ramblings of a woman's memories of her childhood, scattered with ramblings from her mentally ill mother's journal, with bits and pieces of current time fit in. I could not get into the story even after listening for 2 hours.
You didn’t love this book... but did it have any redeeming qualities?
The book jacket makes it sound like an interesting story.
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1 person found this helpful