Of Time and Memory: My Parents' Love Story - Softcover

Snyder, Don J.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0345427696 ISBN 13: 9780345427694

Publisher: Ballantine Books, 2001

Synopsis

Don Snyder knew nothing about his mother aside from the terrible fact that she died at the age of nineteen, just sixteen days after giving birth to him and his twin brother. All his life Don had been too shy, too deeply pained to ask his father or grandparents to tell him the story of the lovely girl named Peggy Snyder--what delighted or troubled her, who her friends were, how she fell in love, what cut short her brief life.

But then, nearing his fiftieth birthday and compelled by his father's failing health, Snyder embarked on a quest to find his mother. He traveled many times from his home in Maine down to his mother's small Pennsylvania town to trace her childhood and adolescence. He tracked down Peggy's high school friends, spent time with her teachers, probed the memories of the girls--now elderly women-- who had been her bridesmaids. Detail by detail, Don pieced together the harrowing story of Peggy's final year--her passionate love affair with her husband, the unexpected pregnancy, the sudden illness that consumed her, and the impossible choice she was forced to make.

A heartbreaking, overwhelmingly beautiful book, Of Time and Memory is a story of remembering--and reclaiming--the fragile mystery of a beloved life.

About this title

Review

Sixteen days after author Don Snyder (The Cliff Walk) and his twin brother were born in 1950, their 19-year-old mother died. Her heartbroken husband, Richard, chose to never discuss her with his sons. But when Snyder, now in his late 40s, stumbles across a picture of his parents, he determines to excavate his mother's short existence as a gift for his father, who is dying from a brain tumor. This tender but terribly sad memoir is the result: the chronicle of smart, beautiful, but intensely private Peggy Schwartz, who wasn't as confident as she seemed, who felt completed by the love of a devout World War II veteran, who chose to carry her pregnancy to term and conceal her life-threatening toxemia from that beloved husband. As Snyder delves into his mother's life and death, he alternates between the love and rage that bring him closer to the man most deeply scarred by this youthful tragedy. The book's last scene, in which father and son sit together looking through Dick and Peggy Snyder's wedding album, is almost unbearably poignant. Yet there's also joy in the author's mystical belief that his quest has opened for him "the path back through stars and memory" that will one day reunite wife and husband, mother and sons. --Wendy Smith

About the Author

"Of Time and Memory reads like a mystery story and it is that suspense, coupled with Snyder's honest prose, that is most engaging."
--The New York Times Book Review

"A COMPELLING MEMOIR . . . WISE AND COMPASSIONATE."
--Biography Magazine

"EXTRAORDINARILY GRIPPING."
--Miami Herald

About this edition

• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0345427696
• ISBN 13: 9780345427694
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 287