The Hand That First Held Mine

Listen.  The trees in the story are stirring, trembling, readjusting themselves.  A breeze is coming in gusts off the sea, and it is almost as if the trees know in their restlessness, in their head-tossing importance, that something is about to happen.

Maggie O’Farrell’s The Hand That First Held Mine  is a story about motherhood, memories, connections and most of all, self-definition.  Elina is a Finnish artist living in present-day London with her film editor boyfriend Ted and she has just given birth with the complications of blood loss and emergency surgery.  As a consequence, she doesn’t remember any of it and starts the story very confused.  Struggling with  pain and exhaustion Elina tries to come to terms with her new role and as she does,she slowly regains both her footing and her memory.  Meanwhile Ted starts having flashes of early memories becoming very disconcerted as he can’t make any sense of what is happening and he starts to  lose his place in the world.

Elina and Ted’s story is alternated with one taking place fifty years earlier when twenty-one year old Lexie Sinclair moves to London and gets a job working for an Art Magazine. Lexie is a bright, articulate woman who is also trying to find her voice and place in this new modern world.   Lexie falls in love, suffers a tragedy, and eventually comes to a place where she is happy.  As Lexie moves forward with her life, Ted is working his way backward,  and the two stories eventually collide.

When I first started reading this novel I was having one of those “can’t go to bed yet – must keep reading” experiences.  Until I thought I had figured everything out and then I lost interest slightly.  However, picking up the book a few days later, I found out I was wrong and then I had to keep going.  I thought O’Farrell did a really good job of interweaving the two story lines and I found myself interested in all three main characters (Ted, Elina, and Lexie).  I wanted Elina to get back on her feet and find her new “normal” and I wanted Ted to be able to figure out what his new “normal” was as well.

This novel wants you to explore how people define themselves and what happens when that definition is altered or even shattered in a way.  How does someone rebuild from such an experience? And is there a difference if the event happens to a child or to an adult?  O’Farrell, as a novelist, puts questions such as these to the reader in such a way that the reader is drawn into the story in very much the same way as Ted puts together scenes from the film so it makes sense to the viewer.

I enjoyed this book and have put O’Farrell’s previous novel The Vanishing Act Of Esmie Lennox on my reading list.  I understand she also explores the issues of forgetting and family in that book and I think she is a writer worth keeping on the To Read List.

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