Memory Board: A Novel

by Jane Rule

Memory—and the tenuousness of life—is the theme of this deeply moving novel by Jane Rule

When the novel opens, Diana’s twin brother, David, a widower in his mid-sixties, is looking back on his life. As memories swamp him, he decides to take a critical step: to beg for his sister’s forgiveness.

Diana has never met David’s two daughters. She has no idea how many grandchildren he has. David doesn’t know Diana’s longtime lover, Constance, housebound by advancing memory loss and for whom Diana writes the day’s events on an erasable board to help her keep track of a life that’s slipping away. Estranged for nearly forty years, David appears at Diana’s dinner table, throwing her life into turmoil. But as she and her brother begin to rediscover each other, they both find the strength to move on with their lives.

Told in Diana and David’s alternating points of view, Memory Board makes a powerful case for living in the present and making every moment count.

Genres: Fiction, Queer, Lesbian, LGBT, Canada, Womens, Novels

311 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Jane Vance Rule was a Canadian writer of lesbian-themed novels and non-fiction. American by birth and Canadian by choice, Rule's pioneering work as a writer and activist reached across borders.

Rule was born on March 28, 1931, in Plainfield, New Jersey, and raised in the Midwest and California. She earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Mills College in 1952. In 1954 she joined the faculty of the Concord Academy, a private school in Massachusetts. There Rule met Helen Sonthoff, a fellow faculty member who became her life partner. They settled in Vancouver in 1956. Eventually they both held positions at the University of British Columbia until 1976 when they moved to Galiano Island. Sonthoff died in 2000, at 83. Rule died at the age of 76 on November 28, 2007 at her home on Galiano Island due to complications from liver cancer, refusing any treatment that would take her from the island.

A major literary figure in Canada, she wrote seven novels as well as short stories and nonfiction. But it was for Desert of the Heart that she remained best known. The novel published in 1964, is about a professor of English literature who meets and falls in love with a casino worker in Reno. It was made into a movie by Donna Deitch called Desert Hearts in 1985, which quickly became a lesbian classic.

Rule, who became a Canadian citizen in the 1960s, was awarded the Order of British Columbia in 1998 and the Order of Canada in 2007. In 1994, Rule was the subject of a Genie-awarding winning documentary, Fiction and Other Truths; a film about Jane Rule, directed by Lynne Fernie and Aerlyn Weissman, produced by Rina Fraticelli. She received the Canadian Authors Association best novel and best short story awards, the American Gay Academic Literature Award, the U.S. Fund for Human Dignity Award of Merit, the CNIB's Talking Book of the Year Award and an honorary doctorate of letters from the University of British Columbia. In January of 2007, Rule was awarded the Alice B. Toklas Medal “for her long and storied career as a lesbian novelist.”

Proud Life - Jane Rule: 1931 - 2007 by Marilyn Schuster
Jane Rule 1996 - George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award

Reviews

[Erika Nerdypants · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is possibly one of the loveliest books I have read. There are so many layers in the story of David and Diana, estranged twins who are recently reunited, and I realized that had I read this book 20 years ago, it might not have spoken to me the way it did now. There is the love story between Constance and Diana, who have been together for forty years, and who now have to cope with Constance's memory loss and slow slide into dementia. David has his own struggles as he is trying to strike a balance between letting go of his adult children without losing a sense of belonging and family. The writing is lyrical, the descriptions of gardens and the desert evocative, but for me the real prize here is in how deftly and sensitively Rule handled her characters. Beautiful.

[CaseyTheCanadianLesbrarian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jane Rule’s 1987 Memory Board was recommended to me as the novel I should start with when approaching this Canadian lesbian writing legend who passed away in 2007. I followed the advice of the professors who gave me a quick Jane Rule 101 via facebook (thanks Wendy and Douglass!) and read Memory Board before being familiar with any of Rule’s other writing, so I can’t confirm (yet) that for me this is indeed her finest work. I can say, though, that it is definitely a book written by an experienced writer in firm control of her craft and the narrative at hand. Although it’s a novel, Memory Board is also a calculated psychological character study that has more going on in the heads and hearts of the characters than anything conventionally called action. There are a few events, of course, but Rule deals with these developments in such an understated manner that even the revelation that one of the minor characters has AIDS doesn’t feel as shocking as it ought to....

read the rest of my review on my website: http://caseythecanadianlesbrarian.wor...

[Jo-anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Absolutely loved this book. Read it by accident as I had loaned to someone over 20 years ago and they returned it while doing a bookshelf cleaning! Turned out I had never read it, although I have a great many of Jane Rules books.
What a marvellous writer. Being set in Vancouver in the mid 1980's it was a bit of a walk down memory lane. Rule's writing is so easy to read and her characters are fully fleshed ( unlike the Urquhart I just read :( )
An interesting look as well at the gay community in the 80's and the attitude towards AIDS HIV which was just becoming a huge health issue.
I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to have a different perspective on what families can mean to each other and how they can both be a bane and a salvation.

[Andrea Watson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed reading this book, which I picked up at a thrift store on recognition of the authors name and that she wrote lesbian characters. Felt like reading the story of my queer elders. I was tremendously touched by Constance navigating the later years of her life in her forgetfulness with only the trust she has in Diana. Also, in the creation of a chosen family of support for her.

[Fran]

I love the companionship between Diana and Constance

[Dee]

$11 for a book published five years ago, with no reviews from verified purchases, seems a little steep.

Added to Wishlist.

[Barrett · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book several years ago and it haunts me still. Beautifully evocative. A wonderful cautionary tale.

[Jenny Yates · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s been more than 30 years since I read this, so I thought it was time to read it again. And it’s still a really great book. It was written in the 80s, when the climate was very different for gay people. Still, this is a time of change, and this is especially felt by the aging characters in this novel. There’s a gradual social awareness that is a bit unnerving to an elderly lesbian who has guarded her privacy and her dignity for so long.

The lesbian couple of the book – Diana and Constance - are drawn so beautifully. Constance is especially enchanting, even as she deals with acute memory loss. Her charm, and Diana’s long years of cherishing her, really come through. Diana is a thornier character, and the novel is about a reconciliation between her and her twin brother, David.

David’s thoughtful approach to old age makes him another vivid character. He’s surrounded by his daughters, sons-in-law, and five grandchildren, but he thinks often about the sister that he’s kept secret all these years. It was the homophobia of his deceased wife that caused this rift, and now he’s realizing how much he gave up when he went along with her agenda.

This is one of the best novels I’ve ever read about aging, and about living with an aging partner.

[Doreen Fritz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this for a book club, but so glad it came into my to-read pile. I was totally engaged throughout this telling of the lives of twins David and Diana, who have been estranged as adults due to David's wife's intolerance for anyone so "different." Diana is living with her longtime companion and partner, Constance, and after David's wife's death, he reaches out to reconnect with his twin. Partly due to his loneliness, and partly because he just misses his sister and wants to get to know her as she currently is rather than just remember her as a child and youth. Diana lives simply, with a lot of routine, partly because she is retired, but mostly due to Constance's increasing memory loss. David's relationship with Diana and Constance isn't received well by everyone in his life, and this book is as much about the various relationships we all navigate in our lives as it is about the central characters. Daughters, grandsons, and others come in and out of the action, as David, Diana, and Constance each adjust to life as senior citizens. What can they keep? What (and who) is important? What must they give up?

[Deane · Rating 4 out of 5]

David and Diana are twins who were extremely close when young but when Diana chose Constance whom she met in England during WWII as her life-long partner, David's wife wanted no part of Diana's life to the point that his children and others didn't know David had a twin.
Over the years David and Diana have only met on their shared birthday but now that his wife has died, he wants to rekindle his relationship with Diana. At first it was slow going because Diana no longer trusts him and she has become very protective of Constance who is suffering with dementia and needs constant care; can't be left alone.
How David reacts to this older painfully arthritic Diana and the troubled Constance, dealing with the mixed feeling of his two daughters and their families is a very sweet, loving story.

[Rosemary Dreyer · Rating 3 out of 5]

I know she is a celebrated author ... However, I found this novel really dull. The interesting parts were the insights into dementia, and the havoc and sadness that creates around the person with dementia. The characters were well drawn. But the whole novel felt uninspired. The end was abrupt. Just a so-so read.

[Janet Ramski · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a softly gentle book this was! The regrowing of a close relationship, the sweet sorrow of dementia stealing away a lover, the awkward complexities of sibling & parent relationships.... Though it started off slowly and awkwardly, within a few hours I couldn't put it down, and stayed awake far too late to finish it. Highly recommend this.

[Gary R Borman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Engaging family jourey

I was caught up in this journey between a brother and sister . Having gone through a similar situation it was a inspiration to embrace family, they are really the only true friends

[Janice · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vintage

I don't know how one could give a Jane Rule book anything less than the highest number of points possible. This started out a bit slow for me, but only because I was used to reading g more contemporary books.

[Jocelyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 rating.

[Beth M Prewett · Rating 5 out of 5]

A good reminder.....

Of the early struggles of glbtaq persons. A powerful love story, involving many people. A reminder of how deep family ties can be.

[mcarp · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wonderful book about family, relationships and reconciliation. I consider Jane Rule to be a real find and I look forward to reading more of her books.

[Steve · Rating 2 out of 5]

"But he trusted Diana far more than he had his wife or now his daughter, Mary, and not only because Diana was a doctor but because she had been true to her own desire." Ho hum.

[Janet Bird · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good.

[Marylee Lannan · Rating 4 out of 5]

How did I not know this author?

[Sharon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jane Rule was ahead of the curve when she published this story about sharing life with a person with memory loss. It is not dark the way the elegy about Iris Murdoch’s struggle with Alzheimer’s is, a window filmed with grime, bile, anger and fear. Instead, Memory Board is gentle and loving, so much so that I wondered if Rule succumbed to fantasy, but just as aging brings out different aspects of people, so too, must dementia.

Rule takes the reader into a warm home in which the long-term couple lead cozy lives and the blank moments are taken in stride with resourcefulness and good humor. Constance, the one who needs the memory board to manage her day, recognizes Diana and is for the time being spared the fear of having no idea who shares her bed. Both women are blessed with good sense and confident dispositions, comfortable with the relationship they have tended, at ease with the once jagged edges now smoothed by loving regard. They each possess an independent sense of self that has accommodated commitment with minimum compromise. Their golden pond is peaceful, even the presence of another romantic partner in the form of Jill, does not rock their boat.

Diana has accepted Constance’s non-monogamy and Jill has accepted the couple as a natural unit, something that leaves her free to fully inhabit being the “other woman.” There is no contest for affection here; the gals learned long ago how to share their toys.

In this Eden with a few bent trees, comes Diana’s twin brother, David. Rule has never lacked courage as a writer and she uses it here to explore David, from the inside out, amid trust issues stirred by his desire to reconnect.

The novel concerns marriage (same-sex and heterosexual), prejudice, trust, change, reliability, family and love. It focuses on what is broken and what can be repaired. Memory Board reflects the homophobia of the late 1980's. Spending time with Rule's Diana is like being invited to enjoy intelligent conversation in a flawed world that has, above all, decency and order.

[Nina · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a Kitchen Sink book (as in, toss in everything but the kitchen sink). The central plot line is too slender to support a novel: estranged twins reunite without much fuss. So Rule tosses in complications: one twin has a partner who is suffering from dementia; a young boy (an artist, of course, We Duck for Cliches) gets AIDS; the twin who is a father deals with a misbehaving adult child; let's do a travelogue to a US desert tourist town--you get the idea.

Diana, the doctor lesbian twin, is oh-so-accepting of the AIDS boy, although she has no contact with the gay community in general, and no background in AIDS, and has shown a rather rigid approach to pretty much everything else. One gets the feeling that since the book is set in the '80s, Rule felt she had to include what we used to call the Plague. Yet her distant and dispassionate descriptions of the dying boy indicates she probably didn't have any direct experience here. Those of us who survived the '80s in NYC, watching our friends die, can be forgiven, I hope, for being offended by this attitude.

Rule's sentences are sometimes oddly constructed so they need to be read twice to get their sense. It's often a missing comma, or a clause stuffed in the wrong spot. Annoying, but not a deal breaker. When balanced against her insights into human nature, this becomes negligible.

I suppose, as usual, my fundamental complaint about this book is there isn't much to it. Have I become so cranky in my own old age that I can't bear a book that ends with Happily Ever After?

[Faith Reidenbach · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of North America's most celebrated novelists tells the story of a 65-year-old man who wants to re-engage with his lesbian twin sister, Diana, after a 40-year estrangement. He also expects his daughters, sons-in-law, and grandchildren to engage with an aunt they never knew they had. Diana is still living with her partner of 40 years, who now has Alzheimer's disease (or some form of dementia). This book gives us deep insight into that disease, without being grim, and depicts a long-term relationship that's intriguingly outside the norm.

Jane Rule's prose is a bit dense and slow for me. (At the risk of sounding like I'm in Creative Writing 101, I'd summarize it as too much telling, too little showing.) But even a bad novel by Rule is better than 90% of lesbian novels, and this is not one of her bad novels. In fact, it's the best of hers that I've read.

[Ari · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the author that failed to impress me with 'Desert of the Heart', but I'm glad I gave her another shot. Within the first few pages of this one, I was hooked. The only downfall was the existential ending. Generally a feature I like in books, but in this case I feel like it didn't fit. I desparately wanted a happy ending or at least a more resolved one, and what I got was a real one. You can read other reviews to get the story line. What I have to say about this book is that Rule did an excellent job of both creating a political-sexual-societal view time capsule while at the same time writing a slightly dated (a CD player was the new gadget of the year!) but emotionally timeless piece. Rule finally broke out of her own box: this is a book that includes queer characters without being about queer characters. A good read.

[Michèle Dextras · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book after listening to an interview between Jane Rule and Peter Gzowski when it first came out. It was such a tender book, beautifully written and poignant. A good friend of mine had "come out" the summer before and this book along with Ms. Rule's other book I subsequently read, helped me understand and accept my friend for who she was.

The book in particular also helped me later in life, understand aging and Alzheimer's disease and allow me to approach and accept people who suffer from this disease more easily, more naturally. Of of my all time favourite books.

I have just re-read this book, not something I often do, and it is as poignant as ever. It gives a good idea of how society has evolved since the book was first published in 1987.

[Rainbowgardener · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jane Rule is another of my favorite authors. She writes about lesbian characters not because they are lesbians and not making a big deal of it, just as human beings. This one is a tour de force. An older man who reconnects with his lesbian twin sister after 40 years of estrangement. The sister has a long time partner with some unspecified dementia similar to Alzheimers. The book is tender, moving, a little sad, but not grim. It is the relationships they all have and how they all cope with the dementia. The partner is a very sympathetic character, still a witty and lively companion, not just someone with a disability.

[Mom · Rating 3 out of 5]

Memory Board is the story of twins estranged in young adulthood who reconnect as older adults. I liked a lot about the book: the focus on a long-time couple caring for one another with gentleness and mutual respect; a portrayal of Alzheimer's that is realistic but not grim; a story that treats lesbians as individuals rather than as stereotypes or as representatives of a "minority group."

Often I felt that the author was telling me too much about the characters instead of letting me discover them through their actions/thoughts. Nevertheless, these were intriguing characters, characters that I cared about, characters I liked. A gentle, humorous, emotionally intimate book.

[JoyfulK · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this classic novel set in the mid-1980s, Jane Rule creates a cast of unforgettable characters in twins Diana and David, who have been estranged since just after World War II. The plot centers around David and Diana's reconciliation and the weaving together of their lives and extended family in their senior years. A touching and beautifully written novel.

[Candy · Rating 4 out of 5]

The characters were older people, one with memory loss, one with limited mobility, and a widower.
I liked how they helped the person with memory loss by saying, "Let me remember that for you". Then they proceeded to tell her about her own past that they were involved in.
I do especially like books where people are kind to each other, and this is one of those.

[Pat · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the first novels by Jane Rule that I had the pleasure of reading. Once finished I went in search of all her others. This is an amazing story of love, understanding and coping with the trials of Alzheimer's disease.