It was a really good story. It speaks volumes to the nature of life. Happiness, grief, disappointment, loneliness, and love all play important parts in everyday life. However they begin to mean so much more when you can't remember your life. Alice is lost in a sea of confusion when 10 years of her life goes missing. The things she learns about herself may just mean the difference between what really is disaster and her happily ever after.

Listened to in audio format.

What Alice Forgot was set around Alice from the day of her accident to the day of the Monster Meringue Party when her memory returned.

Before Alice hit her head she was a 39 year old mother of 3 and soon to be divorced.  After the accident she thought she was 29 years old, happily married to Nick and pregnant with her first born nicknamed the sultana.  The 29 year old Alice was far nicer then the bitter 39 year old Alice.  I really felt for young Alice when she was shocked to realise that the older version of Alice is a fitness fanatic, thin, well dressed and a large part of the school community.

Whe she first spoke to Nick she was genuinely upset and confused that the man she loved actually despised her.  Also young Alice was close to her older sister Elizabeth but was sad to find other the years their relationship had deteriorated but did not understand why.  In between chapters there were diary extracts from Elizabeth to her therapist which gave her opinion of Alice and Elizabeth's fertility problems.

I enjoyed the memory flashbacks that Alice had revealing snippets of the past.  I longed to find out what happended to Alice to change her personality.  The last 3 chapters made this book for me when you realised that their breakup was not due to one incident but a series of incidents caused by Alice and Nick.  It makes you realise there are 2 sides to every story.

I did enjoy What Alice Forgot but not as much as Big Little Lies.  The story was too long and sometimes dragged.  Unfortunately it did not call me to drop everything to listen.  I also thought the blog entries from Alice's unofficial Grandma were unnecessary.

On the whole a decent story with a satisfying ending.

The mystery is what happened to Alice's marriage. Alice, suffering from a concussion and subsequent amnesia is the one trying to figure out who she is and how it went wrong. Another marvelous book full of kids and after school activities and how destructive it is for a marriage when gender roles make one person the breadwinner and one person the parent. And yes, it is also very white and heteronormative and upper middle class suburban, but again, Moriarty takes seriously the business of having and rearing children, and that is important. Plus now I basically see Reese Witherspoon playing the lead role in every one of the books and I like Reese Witherspoon, so that's okay.

I only have one Moriarty book left to read, and then I am going to be very sad for a while.

Library copy

This book has a fascinating premise. In the beginning, the protagonist Alice falls during her workout at a gym, hits her head, and forgets the past ten years of her life. The last thing she remembers when she wakes up a few minutes later is what happened ten years ago.

The book follows Alice, as she tries to remember and reconstruct her life in the past ten years: from a happy young woman, deliriously in love with her husband, pregnant with their first child, to the busy mother of three, bitter and disillusioned, on the verge of divorce. She doesn’t recognize herself in the portrait people around her see. How did she come from then to now?

I liked Alice’s story. It was engaging and heartfelt. Unfortunately, her story was diluted by two other stories, unconnected and irrelevant to Alice’s line. One was the story of Alice’s sister Elizabeth, styled as entries in Elizabeth’s journal, written at the request of her therapist. Elizabeth’s storyline has as much importance as Alice... but only to Elizabeth. It should’ve been a separate book – a novella maybe – because Elizabeth’s struggles with her infertility truly warrants a book of her own. Bundled together with Alice’s story as they were, both stories lost some of their power. As a consequence, the entire novel seems unfocused, as if it doesn’t know which direction it wants to go.

And then, there is a third story, told as letters of Alice’s grandmother to her former lover, dead for the past five decades. Yes, she still writes to him but she doesn’t send those letters. She knows he is dead so she just collects her own letters in her drawer. What relevance do these letters have to either Alice’s story or Elizabeth’s is anyone’s guess.

On the whole, not a bad book but not a very good one either. The writing was good, utterly professional, the characterization clear, the characters sympathetic, but the structure of the novel sucked.

Feels like it's been a long time...I've still been reading just haven't felt like doing reviews much. Any who this novel has had me since the first page. I think I may finish it tonight or early in the morning.