Of Time and Memory: A Mother's Story

As a child, Snyder intuited that he was not to probe his father about the past--""a place where the hearse was parked."" In this engrossing account of his attempt, at age 47, to piece together the life story of his mother, Peggy, by talking to her family, friends and neighbors, Snyder admits it was ""preposterous"" that he and his twin brother had never asked certain questions about her or the circumstances of her sudden death, at 19, days after their birth in rural Pennsylvania. He had known nothing of his parents' love story--of the veteran and the prettiest girl in Hatfield, Pa., or of their honeymoon in Manhattan in 1949, 10 months before Peggy died. Snyder, the author of two novels, a biography and a previous memoir, The Cliff Walk, found that his curiosity about Peggy assumed an urgency when he was visiting his ailing father, now a retired minister, in 1997. He unflinchingly plumbs his family's ""unremembering,"" born of a grief so profound it begs the question of complicity in the death of Peggy's memory. This memoir of his discovery process braids earnest, if effusive, ruminations with novelistic passages in which Snyder steps into his mother's consciousness to narrate her story. Some readers may find this fictional approach less an act of devotion than a strange appropriation of her life, since she is not present to forgive errors of fact or omission. But Snyder's painstaking evocation of his emotional odyssey in search of a young woman with extraordinary courage will resonate with most readers. Agent, Lynn Nesbit, Janklow & Nesbit Associates. (Sept.)