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What Alice Forgot
by Liane Moriarty
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.