The Memory Room

A shattered woman rebuilds herself from the ruins of childhood trauma, guided by a therapist, the Psalms, and the fractured poetry of Paul Celan

The novel opens with Barbara, who, after remembering incidents of torture at the hands of her father, has quite literally broken down. Found inside a disabled elevator, she is no longer able to function with her new consciousness of these memories--those which are so resistant to understanding. Confronted with this knowledge of evil, she must begin the painful process of remembering and reconstructing a new whole self.

Helping Barbara to navigate her grief and her memories are her therapist, the Psalms, and most of all, the words of Paul Celan. Paul Celan: 1920-1970, Poet. An eastern European holocaust survivor who wrote haunting poems about the darker spiritual trials of life and relationships that exhibit a compact style that fuses broken words and chopped syntax to produce a stark musicality.

This is a novel about a woman who goes to hell and back. It's a story which affirms the resilience of the human spirit and the healing power of love and faith.

Mary Rakow, winner of a 2003 Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship for fiction, has a Masters degree from Harvard University Divinity School and a PhD in Theology from Boston College. A native Californian, she currently lives in Los Angeles. The Memory Room is her first novel.