Reviews
“In lyrically elegant prose, Bartók’s The Memory Palace explores not just relationships but the slippery nature of memory itself … A heartbreaking expression of devotion to a mother she loved but had to abandon in order to survive.”
— Liza Nelson, O Magazine, Read full review »
“At the center of Mira Bartok’s memoir about her schizophrenic mother is a beautiful metaphor: a memory palace … Thanks to Bartok’s acutely visual imagination, each room in her memory palace is richly detailed … Bartok’s memory palace contains some rare, distinctive and genuinely imaginative treasures.”
— Melanie Thernstrom, The New York Times Sunday Book Review, Read full review »
“She brilliantly teases out the emotional and physical fallout… The fact that Bartók can convey how and why she still loves her mother is perhaps the book’s greatest triumph.”
— Judy Bolton-Fasman, The Boston Globe, Read full review »
“This is a lovely if harrowing book, compassionate to its core… Bartók writes that she always believed her mother’s sweetness endured, hidden somewhere beneath the madness… Her remarkable memoir compels us to consider that it must exist in others who have fallen outside the clutch of normalcy, too.”
— Kristin Ohlson, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, Read full review »
“This grounded, exquisitely written work is one in the ongoing flood of memoirs that requires reading.”
— Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal, Read full review »
“If this book were a person, I’d consider making out with it.”
— Julie Kane, Library Journal, Read full review »
“The writing is intimate and exquisite, with sentences and paragraphs worth reading and re-reading just to savor the words. . . The Memory Palace is not so much a palace of memories as a complex web of bewitching verbal and visual images, memories, dreams, true stories and rambling excerpts from the author’s mentally ill mother’s notebooks. It is an extraordinary mix.”
— Reeve Lindbergh, The Washington Post, Read full review »
