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3.95 AVERAGE
3.95 AVERAGE
Delicious. Spell-binding. Sorrowful. Joyful. Surprising. Eye-opening. Revealing. And thought-provoking.
How did I stumble upon What Alice Forgot? Because Liane Moriarity wrote it. She's my most favorite novelist at this current moment in time. I've read three other delicious books by her - all on Audible with the wonderful Australian accent of the narrator. "The Husband's Secret", "Big Little Lies", "The Hypnotist's Story", and my least favorite was probably "The Hypnotist's Story" but still, I love it.
"What Alice Forgot" hits home most of all for me, even though I can't relate to motherhood or a failing marriage, it's the idea that who you were 10 years ago is so very different from who you are today. Your friends change. Your likes and dislikes change. Your personality evolves and as you take on life's responsibilities - kids, marriage, house, a million activities - as Alice does, well, you become someone else.
It was bittersweet to read about the memory loss when Alice wakes up from banging her head at her spin class and thinks she's her younger self by 10 years, a 29-year old funny, sweet, self-conscious, shy, pregnant Alice and totally in love with her husband. And how the world disagrees with her on everything. "Oh Alice" was a funny expression in her self-talk.
As she goes through life figuring what has transpired in this span of time, she is shocked and confused, saddened (she's divorcing the love of her life, she's bossy and decisive and busy - oh so busy) and delighted (she's rich! she's got a closet full of gorgeous clothes, she's thin!), and she continues to be herself. She's forgotten everything: her children, her boyfriend, her best friend, her simple happy life.
Life was simpler in 1999 in Alice's mind. No internet. No crazy constant busyness. No complicated relationships. She was in love. "What could we be arguing about?" She asks so innocently that everyone gets angry with her. "But we were so happy. What happened?", or to her sister, "Don't we spend time together? Aren't we close?" Oh, it was fascinating as she digs into the cobwebs of her mind, searching for memories, and coming up short. She has no sense of attachment to this world she's thrown into and yet, she manages quite well. In fact, she repairs a lot of harm done over the years simply by being honest and kind.
Moriarty pulled off a hard plot here. I love how she makes it so believable, so hilarious, so sad, so true, so freaking REAL. How does she do it? I don't know. I just want to read and read and read .... she is a master story-teller with plots of family, relationships, romance, children, and life as it happens to them. Yet, she addresses a serious topic in each of her novels. In this one, it was infertility, sibling relationships, failing marriage and the impact on children, and how we get all so busy to have time to be happy. So yeah! It's a great book. I'd read it (or listen to it) all over again.
I LOVE YOU, Liane Moriarty. What fun that I am heading to Australia next week. Maybe I'll run into you in Sydney and spot you working on your next best-selling novel. Thank you for writing these books. They are a treasure to behold.
How did I stumble upon What Alice Forgot? Because Liane Moriarity wrote it. She's my most favorite novelist at this current moment in time. I've read three other delicious books by her - all on Audible with the wonderful Australian accent of the narrator. "The Husband's Secret", "Big Little Lies", "The Hypnotist's Story", and my least favorite was probably "The Hypnotist's Story" but still, I love it.
"What Alice Forgot" hits home most of all for me, even though I can't relate to motherhood or a failing marriage, it's the idea that who you were 10 years ago is so very different from who you are today. Your friends change. Your likes and dislikes change. Your personality evolves and as you take on life's responsibilities - kids, marriage, house, a million activities - as Alice does, well, you become someone else.
It was bittersweet to read about the memory loss when Alice wakes up from banging her head at her spin class and thinks she's her younger self by 10 years, a 29-year old funny, sweet, self-conscious, shy, pregnant Alice and totally in love with her husband. And how the world disagrees with her on everything. "Oh Alice" was a funny expression in her self-talk.
As she goes through life figuring what has transpired in this span of time, she is shocked and confused, saddened (she's divorcing the love of her life, she's bossy and decisive and busy - oh so busy) and delighted (she's rich! she's got a closet full of gorgeous clothes, she's thin!), and she continues to be herself. She's forgotten everything: her children, her boyfriend, her best friend, her simple happy life.
Life was simpler in 1999 in Alice's mind. No internet. No crazy constant busyness. No complicated relationships. She was in love. "What could we be arguing about?" She asks so innocently that everyone gets angry with her. "But we were so happy. What happened?", or to her sister, "Don't we spend time together? Aren't we close?" Oh, it was fascinating as she digs into the cobwebs of her mind, searching for memories, and coming up short. She has no sense of attachment to this world she's thrown into and yet, she manages quite well. In fact, she repairs a lot of harm done over the years simply by being honest and kind.
Moriarty pulled off a hard plot here. I love how she makes it so believable, so hilarious, so sad, so true, so freaking REAL. How does she do it? I don't know. I just want to read and read and read .... she is a master story-teller with plots of family, relationships, romance, children, and life as it happens to them. Yet, she addresses a serious topic in each of her novels. In this one, it was infertility, sibling relationships, failing marriage and the impact on children, and how we get all so busy to have time to be happy. So yeah! It's a great book. I'd read it (or listen to it) all over again.
I LOVE YOU, Liane Moriarty. What fun that I am heading to Australia next week. Maybe I'll run into you in Sydney and spot you working on your next best-selling novel. Thank you for writing these books. They are a treasure to behold.
I loved the juxtaposed Alices.
It's so easy to fall into the busyness of life with kids. We forget who we are as individuals because of the responsibilities we have as parents. Sometimes it's a loss, a death or something more personal like the injury Alice has, that reminds us that we can be our own person and be a parent. Life is challenging, especially being married and having kids. It's much harder to stay open to the possibility, like Alice post-spin accident, that not all is lost.
It's so easy to fall into the busyness of life with kids. We forget who we are as individuals because of the responsibilities we have as parents. Sometimes it's a loss, a death or something more personal like the injury Alice has, that reminds us that we can be our own person and be a parent. Life is challenging, especially being married and having kids. It's much harder to stay open to the possibility, like Alice post-spin accident, that not all is lost.
I enjoyed this far more than I expected given the mixed reviews I'd heard of it. Maybe it's because I've just turned 29 and my husband and I are looking to become parents in the next year, so I could identify with Alice's naïve and idealized views of marriage and parenthood even while acknowledging that they were (are) naïve and idealized. This book caused me to pause and re-examine my life goals. Alice discovers that at 39 she's finally achieved her "ideal life" -- all the house renovations she dreamed about are complete, she's fit and has a personal trainer, she's involved with her kids' school, she's organized and reliable -- and yet she's separated from her husband, her kids seem unhappy, she's made enemies throughout the neighborhood and the school, and she's become too busy to stay involved in her sister's life.
When I heard the premise of this book I had imagined the whole book as being more hokey, or else more serious and depressing, than it was, but Moriarty somehow managed to walk the line between realism and absurdity for maximum enjoyment. I appreciated that she distinguished between conscious and unconscious memory, so Alice still has her muscle memory and still snaps at her kids with well-worn, automatic parental phrases, even while she can't consciously remember any information about them. Scents and sounds evoke feelings, even when she can't recall the memories attached to them. And it's true that we don't remember every individual day of our lives, but rather particular landmark memories, which may be simply images or phrases that lose their meaning out of context; this is what made Alice's memory loss so much more believable for me.
I probably could have done without the Frannie subplot. I think the idea was that Elisabeth's story is meant to provide a foil to Alice's experiences as a parent while Frannie's story is a foil to Alice's experiences in marriage, but I don't think Frannie's story did that as successfully as Elisabeth's. Still, it didn't take away from the book; it was more like a separate story that reminded me strongly of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. The tone of the book (plus the focus on family, school mom cliques, and the like) also reminded me a lot of Where'd You Go, Bernadette, although I enjoyed this one better and it wasn't quite as absurdist.
One of the things that I like so much about this book is that it resists easy explanations. Alice keeps trying to reach for them (Nick must have cheated on me and that's why we're getting divorced), while the truth is much more complex and steeped in context. And one of the questions this book asks is, How much weight should we give to that context? Without the context, Alice's past decisions seem terrible, but within the context it's hard to see how she could feel -- and therefore act -- otherwise.
I wasn't sure at first if I liked the ending, but ultimately I do. It's somewhat far-fetched that Alice would regain all her memories in one fell swoop, but I suppose it's not that much more unlikely than losing them all in the first place. I'm glad she ends up back together with Nick -- and c'mon, that was a little inevitable by the fact that the divorce was not yet finalized when she lost her memory -- but I'm glad it happened the way it did, not because she'd lost all context for her anger with him but because she'd learned on her own to take a different perspective despite the context.
Recommended -- even if you don't mesh with all the author's decisions, the book is almost guaranteed to make you think and help you re-focus in one way or another.
When I heard the premise of this book I had imagined the whole book as being more hokey, or else more serious and depressing, than it was, but Moriarty somehow managed to walk the line between realism and absurdity for maximum enjoyment. I appreciated that she distinguished between conscious and unconscious memory, so Alice still has her muscle memory and still snaps at her kids with well-worn, automatic parental phrases, even while she can't consciously remember any information about them. Scents and sounds evoke feelings, even when she can't recall the memories attached to them. And it's true that we don't remember every individual day of our lives, but rather particular landmark memories, which may be simply images or phrases that lose their meaning out of context; this is what made Alice's memory loss so much more believable for me.
I probably could have done without the Frannie subplot. I think the idea was that Elisabeth's story is meant to provide a foil to Alice's experiences as a parent while Frannie's story is a foil to Alice's experiences in marriage, but I don't think Frannie's story did that as successfully as Elisabeth's. Still, it didn't take away from the book; it was more like a separate story that reminded me strongly of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. The tone of the book (plus the focus on family, school mom cliques, and the like) also reminded me a lot of Where'd You Go, Bernadette, although I enjoyed this one better and it wasn't quite as absurdist.
One of the things that I like so much about this book is that it resists easy explanations. Alice keeps trying to reach for them (Nick must have cheated on me and that's why we're getting divorced), while the truth is much more complex and steeped in context. And one of the questions this book asks is, How much weight should we give to that context? Without the context, Alice's past decisions seem terrible, but within the context it's hard to see how she could feel -- and therefore act -- otherwise.
Recommended -- even if you don't mesh with all the author's decisions, the book is almost guaranteed to make you think and help you re-focus in one way or another.
lighthearted
reflective
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
this is the slice of life book i read when i’m ill in bed
I enjoyed this book although it definitely didn't have as twisty of an ending as her books usually do. Still a good read!
I just didn’t care
Content Warnings
Moderate: Infertility
I’m definitely not the target audience for this book, but I read it because it was recommended to me because I like some of her other books. The beginning was very confusing which made me frustrated. The ending was cute though.
This was a great book. I really enjoyed reading it. It starts out with Alice coming to after hitting her head and finding herself having missed 10 years worth of memory. It is entertaining to follow her as she's trying to piece together what happened in the mean time. In the end the book has a beautiful message.
It certainly was an interesting premise and I certainly have enjoyed other books by Liane Moriarty, however, this was just far too long. It could easily have been 200 pages less.