What Alice Forgot by Lianne Moriarty

Alice Love is twenty-nine years old and pregnant with her first child. She and her husband Nick are deeply in love and very excited about their soon-to-be-born child. Alice’s older sister Elizabeth is her best friend, and life is good. The year is 1998.

But when Alice falls at gym and hits her head, something strange happens. She wakes up, not pregnant and not in 1998. It’s 2008, and Alice has lost the memory of the past ten years of her life. I liked the way this book, essentially chick-lit, ended. The ending was unexpected, and I was pleased with the choices the author made about her characters and their choices.

Of course, this novel made me think about memories, good and bad. Who are we without our memories?

Before I Go to Sleep by S.J. Watson

In this amnesiac novel, Christine has lost more than twenty years of her life. She, too, was involved in an accident that caused her to lose her memory, but for Christine her ability to form and retain memories is impaired. She can remember what’s happened to her today, but when she goes to sleep and wakes up the next morning, her memories are all gone. Each day is a clean slate in which Christine starts out believing that she is still a twenty-something or even a child rather than a forty-five year old wife and mother. Christine’s husband, Ben, must remind her every morning who she is, where she is, and who he is.

“I cannot imagine how I will cope when I discover that my life is behind me, has already happened, and I have nothing to show for it. No treasure house of recollection, no wealth of experience, no accumulated wisdom to pass on. What are we, if not a accumulation of our memories?”

This second book is more of a thriller: Christine’s memory loss puts her in a situation that is not what it seems to be, and by the end of the book Christine is in serious danger of losing her life if she cannot find a way to access the memories that will enable her to distinguish between truth and lies.

I thought both of these were worthwhile, if you’re at all interested in the premise. I also found a couple of books at Amazon that would make good nonfiction companion reads to these two novels. I haven’t read these, but I would like to do so soon.

Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer. “Foer . . . draws on cutting-edge research, a surprising cultural history of remembering, and venerable tricks of the mentalist’s trade to transform our understanding of human memory. From the United States Memory Championship to deep within the author’s own mind, this is an electrifying work of journalism that reminds us that, in every way that matters, we are the sum of our memories.”

In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind by Eric R. Kandel. “Driven by vibrant curiosity, Kandel’s personal quest to understand memory is threaded throughout this absorbing history. Beginning with his childhood in Nazi-occupied Vienna, In Search of Memory chronicles Kandel’s outstanding career from his initial fascination with history and psychoanalysis to his groundbreaking work on the biological process of memory, which earned him the Nobel Prize.”

And here are some fictional “amnesia books” that I have read and can recommend:
The Last Thing I Remember by Andrew Klavan. YA fiction. Semicolon review here. Sequels are The Long Way Home, The Truth of the Matter, and The Final Hour.

Random Harvest by James Hilton. Semicolon review here.

A Portrait of Jennie by Robert Nathan. Semicolon review here.

Brat Farrar by Josephine Tey. Not exactly an amnesia story, but it reminds me of Hilton’s style somehow. Semicolon review here.

The Professor and the Housekeeper by Yoko Ogawa. Semicolon review here. Engineer Husband is reading this one right now, and it’s one of my favorites. Math and memory loss.

Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac by Gabrielle Zevin. More modern and young adult-ish. Semicolon review here.

The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary Pearson. Also YA and more of a twenty-first century feel. Semicolon review here.

Anne Perry’s William Monk detective series features Mr. Monk as a late nineteenth century private detective suffering from amnesia. His assistant/love interest/foil is a nurse named Hester.

Any more amnesiac selections that you can remember?