Without a Map: A Story in Self-Exile

Meredith Hall's memoir Without a Map  tells her untold story as a pregnant teenager growing up in 1960s Hampton, New Hampshire. She was shunned by her classmates, family, church, and school and for the rest of her life lived in perpetual exile.

What struck me the most in reading this heart-wrenching, despairing story, is the idea of shunning and self-exile. Even after the pregnancy, after she gave up her child and everyone else had given up on her, even when she moved to the city in Cambridge to start a new life, she was lonely. She put herself in the odd position of self-exile as she isolated herself from boyfriend Erik, from girls at her boarding school, and even those that reach out to her like a male classmate that writes to her.

I would like to do a close reading of self-exile in Meredith Hall's Without a Map and how her own chaotic life reflects the chaotic time in terms of world events (referred to in the text), especially pertaining to the 60s and 70s.

Midterm Reflections on Literature, the Self and Life in this 21st Century

I've always been a self-reflective writer.

I like to inject my own personal experiences and reflections into my literary observances. For my "1 Dead in Attic" Hurricane Katrina post, I realized that the day I started reading was the five-year anniversary mark. For my "Falling Man" 9/11 post, I reflected on that infamous "where were you on 9/11" question and where I was on that day and how I've grown up and moved on from that point in time. For my Abu Ghraib post, the torturous images of POWs got me thinking a lot about my own military history. I have friends, cousins, aunts, uncles, grandmothers and grandfathers who served or are currently enlisted. My father is a retired commander in the Navy and my mother was a Sargent in the Marine Corps. I'm very proud of my family's service and it upsets me to think that people could now have such misguided views about the military at large because of what a couple of idiots did on a night shift with a camera.

I like to pose questions that concern me and evoke memories of my own experiences to use myself as a vehicle for provoking thought.

That is a strength of my posts I think. I don't know if my fellow classmates can always relate to me as they are my experiences and mine alone, but I think that everyone has a 9/11 story, everyone has an impression of the Abu Ghraib photographs. I think it is a great downfall and a great disadvantage in this generation of ours that everyone is so self-involved. Facebook statuses aren't going to change the world. But your self-reflections can change the world as it seems for you. We make sense of this crazy, fast-paced, sometimes disorienting, sometimes liberating new millennium we live in today through ourselves. Fact and frame, right? Everyone has an opinion and a story to tell.

And this blog tells mine.

This Blogger takes a Holiday

Hi guys, so I'll be taking my blog holiday for tomorrow's due post. I'll be riding with the Fire Department all tomorrow from 8 in the morning til 8 in the morning on Saturday as part of a special feature article in The New Hampshire and I'll be gone for exactly 24 hours. So, naturally, it doesn't make sense for me to post when I can't read everyone else's blog posts.

Cheers!
-Allie