Memory

Through his first person narrator Hazel's attempts to reconstruct her own version of the past, the author explores the mutability of memory, and its power over the individual. At the start of the novel, Hazel says she has "some experience serving as a vessel for memories of the dead" (7). This notion is introduced shortly after she informs the reader that she has lost her husband, yet is unconvinced of his death. Instead of explicitly exploring her grief and confusion over Vik’s passing, Hazel sets out to rewrite her father's novel, The Blizzard Party. She is convinced that his version of this night from 1978, turned her from the "flesh-and-blood" version of herself into "a photo negative, a child-shaped hole into which anyone who'd read the book tried to fit the Hazel they'd met in those pages" (24). By returning to the events and the people surrounding the...