The year is 1964. Dr. David Henry is forced to deliver his own baby due to an unusual blizzard. His first born is a perfect baby boy, Paul. And soon Phoebe is born unexpectedly. Shockingly Henry realizes the girl has Down’s syndrome so he asks the Nurse Caroline to take Phoebe to an institution and tells his wife Nora that their daughter had dead because he wants to protect his wife from being torn apart by the truth.

Caroline, obedient and in love with her boss, would do anything he asked of her. However, when she arrives at the institution with Phoebe, she decides to start a new life and raising the baby girl as her own.

These two decisions are at the core of Kim Edwards' novel, The Memory Keeper's Daughter. (不存在的女儿). The book jumps from that moment to other parallel moments to reflect the lives of twins Paul and Phoebe, and those involved in the choices that created two different dimensions of their decisions.

Over the next twenty-some years. Dr. Henry lives in his world of guilt of not knowing if the decision that he had made was right or wrong. Nora is torn apart by the death of her daughter and attempts to recompense her vacuous through various affairs and the start of a new career. On the other hand, Caroline’s life blossoms into something almost idyllic because of the decision that she made. And as for both Paul and Phoebe and how their lives have been so different and dramatic since their separate at birth.

The ground of regret is hardly an untraveled landscape in literature as stated by the others. Therefore by being open to sorrow will lead our lives to happiness and the only result that we get from preventing grief is to magnify it.

And so life is so rhetorical and contradict. (daoluan)