Writer's life is map to literary success
It was 1965 and Meredith Hall was happily growing up in Hampton, N.H., when she became pregnant at age 16.
She was expelled from school. Her church and community shunned her. Her mother threw her out of the house.
Hall went to live with her father and stepmother in a cold and lonely house in Epping. After giving birth to a son, whom she was forced to give up, she was banned from the house.
Left on her own, she struggled against betrayal, loss, and grief to find her place in the world.
This journey is the basis of "Without A Map," Hall's memoir published by Beacon Press last spring.
The book immediately hit the
"It certainly has been startling," said Hall, 58, a private and unassuming woman who lives in rural Maine and teaches creative nonfiction at the University of New Hampshire.
Until a few years ago, Hall didn't consider herself a writer.
A college dropout, it wasn't until she was 40, and a divorced mother of two young sons, that she enrolled in Bowdoin College in Maine.
She went on to graduate school at UNH and took an essay-writing workshop "for fun." The result was two personal essays, "Shunned" and "Killing Chickens," which won prestigious national writing awards.
"She has an innate compelling voice, which is a huge part of the attraction of her work," said Andrew Merton, who taught the essay course and is now chairman of the UNH English department. "You read a paragraph and you are in it. It's a voice that urgently wants you to hear a compelling story and you can't put it down."
With her essays well received, Hall applied for a $50,000 grant -which she calls "my great audacious act" - and received the 2004 Gift of Freedom Award from A Room of Her Own Foundation, which provides financial support to emerging women writers.
"I had no idea what I was going to write," said Hall, who moved to San Francisco for the grant period. "I thought, 'Well, I've written these two personal essays. I'll write some more of those.' "
In just five months, she completed "Without a Map."
"It was as if the book was being written my whole life," Hall said. "Once I sat down, it was on the page in a second. I didn't revise anything. The next story and the next story came clearly to me. I just knew what they would be."
Hall said important events of her life came to her like slow-motion, detailed movies. They were mostly difficult memories, but the impact didn't hit her until after the writing was completed.
"I was so hard at the creative work that I didn't realize I was doing the emotional work at the same time," Hall said.
After she submitted the manuscript, her editor suggested a few quick changes.
"I started reading for those edits and I thought it was going to be a mechanical act," Hall recalled. "But, it was the first time I started at the beginning and read the entire book through. It knocked me off my feet. I cried for three days straight, really cried.
"The hard work of looking back at all these stories hit me, and I met that young girl as if she was a character on a page and not me," she said. "And she just broke my heart.
"For me, the story is really how we come to build real love, even where there has been hurt and harm," Hall said.
She said it was her aim to write about her family fairly, evenly, and with compassion.
Hall said the son she gave up for adoption, and who found her when he was 21, "has been absolutely courageous and generous-hearted in encouraging me from the beginning to write this book."
When "Without a Map," was released, she was surprised by the response.
"I thought maybe 400 people in the entire country will ever read this book," she said.
And she was uncomfortable with the attention.
"I felt very exposed," Hall said. "But I have realized one of the reasons it has done so well is that it is speaking silent stories that need to be told. Maybe other people don't go through these circumstances, but everybody knows about loss, betrayal, hurt, fear, isolation, and feelings of unworthiness. This particular story had a requirement that no one would speak a word about it, and I broke that rule."
Meredith Hall's next book signing is March 24, 7 p.m., at Water Street Bookstore in Exeter, N.H. She also will be the featured speaker at the May 17 commencement at Northern Essex Community College in Haverhill. For a list of her appearances, visit meredithhall.org.
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