The Memory Keeper's Daughter
By Kim Edwards
Podcast Interviews
Penguin Podcast: "Kim Edwards' debut novel, The Memory Keeper's Daughter, has won the hearts of readers across the nation with its emotional, gripping story and elegant prose. Edwards came in to tell us about her writing process and the responses she's received from readers." Get the podcast.
Print Interviews
“If Edwards isn’t an overnight sensation, she isn’t a character either. She’s serious and straightforward, thoughtful and deliberate. Born in Texas and raised in upstate New York, she spent her entire life planning to be a writer. “When I was very, very young, I just knew that that was something I wanted to do,” she says. ”. . .my mother will tell stories of how I would just pester her constantly to read to me.” When she was in college at Colgate, Edwards studied with Frederick Busch, who became a mentor. After earning her MFA in fiction and an MA in theoretical linguistics, both from the University of Iowa, she and her husband spent five years teaching English in Southeast Asia—Malaysia, Japan, and Cambodia. “It was a time of great learning and great growth and great excitement,” she says. “The chatter of everyday life fell away, and it allowed me to listen more fully to the stories I wanted to tell. It also allowed me to take risks that I wouldn’t have probably been so likely to take if I felt more immediately a part of a literary community. I just was able to have a tremendous amount of freedom to write as I wished to write.”
—Time Magazine