Book review: “I Knew You by Name: The Search for My Lost Mother” by Peggy Barnes
Dog Ear Publishing, 2015. 168 pages.
“Surely God designed a spark between mothers and babies.”
With that thought, author Peggy Barnes takes your hand in hers and leads you into the swirling and often maddening world of the search for her birth mother in “I Knew You by Name: The Search for My Lost Mother.” Even if Peggy Barnes were not a dear friend of mine, I’d still insist that you read this memoir. It is that good.
At times divergent and at others tightly braided together, Peggy Barnes’s life unfolds in the lap of her mother’s. Barnes treats the reader to an intimate view of life for a young, unwed mother—her birth mother, Pauline—in Alabama just as World War II is beginning. Pauline’s daughter, Peggy, grew up knowing only that she was adopted.
Barnes takes the sketchiest of details, enriches them with painstaking research, and mixes in brutal honesty about the struggles in her own life to create a love letter to a mother she never met but always knew. She confronts her own issues of addiction with wry humor and and unblinking candor while speculating about the genetic influence of the extended family members she discovers.
From a small collection of letters in her birth mother’s hand and clues she managed to unearth in her years of research, Barnes pieces together an imagined life for Pauline as rich with emotion as it was void of material resources. She uses the experiences of her own motherhood as a lens through which to frame what Pauline must have experienced as she gave birth to, and then later gave up for adoption, the daughter she knew as MariLouise.
The skill with which “I Knew You by Name: The Search for My Lost Mother” winds its way from what is known to what is imagined is so artful as to give the appearance of seamlessness. By the time I finished reading this, my dear friend’s journey, I truly could not say for certain what had definitely happened and what might have occurred. To call this book a memoir is to understate the chilling accuracy of the description of pre-World War II life in the South for a young woman who finds herself pregnant in a culture that wants nothing to do with such a person. Nor does the term, “memoir,” fully encompass the passion and compassion with which a daughter grows to love a woman with whom her only temporal link is one of genetics.
In the end “I Knew You by Name: The Search for My Lost Mother,” Barnes demonstrates for the reader that she knew her mother much better than simply by name. Peggy’s heart knew Pauline’s. This is a five-star must-read.
