This is the first of Margaret Forster's books that I've tried reading; and it won't be the last. Susannah died when her daughter Catherine was just six months old, but Catherine grows up happily with her father's second wife becoming her Mummy and never wants to find out about Susannah. However when Susannah knew she was dying she assembled a "memory box" for her baby daughter. Finally opening the box as an adult, having ignored it for years, Catherine tries to piece together this jigsaw of a legacy. I really liked the premise, I thought it might be a bit of a manufactured sort of a story but it came over naturally enough. The objects in the box aren't obvious and I thought that Catherine could probably have taken a different path through them and found out different things about Susannah. Which isn't the point really, the point is that it was a good story and the characters were consistent. The narrative reminded me of Barbara Vine a little, possibly because there is a quiet sense of impending doom in the "what will she find out about her mother?" question, but there isn't a hugely terrible hidden secret in here like there would be with Vine. It's more a case of the surprising things that are hidden in ordinary lives. Enjoyable read, good writing, an interesting plot and great characters. I don't ask for much more than that from a book really!

I have always enjoyed Margaret Forster’s biographies and memoirs; two that stick in my mind particularly are her biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and her family memoir called Hidden Lives. Aside from her novel Lady’s Maid, which is more like a biography, The Memory Box is the first novel of hers I’ve read.

The story is simple: a young woman named Catherine, an only child, when cleaning out her parents’ attic after they have died comes across a memory box put together for her by her “real” mother who died when Catherine was six months old. The mother she knew and loved all her life was actually her stepmother, a woman her father married one year after his first wife died. There’s no mystery in these details, since Catherine was told about her “real” mother vs. her stepmother at an early age. The twist is that all her life, Catherine had been unwilling to hear stories about her mother Susannah from people in the family who thought she would want to know about her. Now, 30-something Catherine finds that she would like to know something about her mother, but the people who could have told her about Susannah are dead. Hence her interest in using the memory box to puzzle out her mother’s story.

The story is told in the first person from Catherine’s point of view. Except for her interactions with family members, like her mother’s sister Isabella who is a very sour, unapproachable woman who didn’t like her sister, Catherine actions, musings, and memories carry the book. Catherine is a complicated personality. She’s introverted and introspective, moody and “difficult” much of the time—and she knows that about herself. I would say that Margaret Forster took something of a risk creating a narrator with Catherine’s personality, since introverts aren’t particularly well understood by the general population--usually they are dismissed as simply being shy people who would love to be extroverted if they only knew now. However, risky or not, I find Catherine’s personality and response to the world to be very appropriate to the tone of the rest of the story. Forster explores themes of memory, motherhood, family relationships--including the nature of family secrets and mythology and how relationships are distorted by them--and finally, of self-discovery.

If you’re looking for a mystery a la Agatha Christie, look elsewhere. If you’re looking for a quiet, introspective read, you’ll find it here. ( )

Forster has an extraordinary tendency to make her first-person narrators unsympathetic. She shows this here, and in "Over" , "The Battle for Christabel" and "Hidden Lives". ( )

Hoewel ik het thema (dochter op zoek naar haar eigen geschiedenis, aan de hand van een doos met voorwerpen die haar moeder heeft achtergelaten als een soort erfenis) intrigerend vond, kon ik me niet goed op dit boek concentreren. Een wat tegenvallend boek, helaas. ( )

This was ok – I found the musing of the main character tedious at times but through this novel family dynamics are explored, particularly the role of parents. Interestingly, the main character is forced to view the parental role through different eyes and the box gives her a new perspective. ( )