What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty
Published:
Genre: Fiction, contemporary
Pages: 475
Who the fuck is Alice? Well, she seems to think she’s a 29 year old happily married woman with a baby on the way, living in 1998 getting ready for the millennium.
In reality its 2008, Alice is 39 has 3 kids and is in the middle of a divorce with a husband who hates her. They assume it’s amnesia, and that her memory will be back any minute. (This does not get specific, and isn’t really the point.)
One of my favorite effects in ANYTHING is when things are nonlinear. The book is of course told in chronological order, but how Alice lives it isn’t. She get’s to go back in time of some sort by forgetting all the life changing events of the last decade. And let’s face it, your thirties are life changing in so many ways, it’s the decade you make or break yourself, the decade you truly come into who you are, for better or worse.
If you let yourself step into Alice’s shoes, you’re in for an eye opening experience. Can you remember the innocence of your twenties? Can you remember the things you thought were worth fighting for that you’ve given up on in your thirties? Can you let yourself be influenced again by your younger self?
I allow myself to be reminded of a romanticized ideology I so desperately wanted to live by and still do. Fragility is so easily lost with time and we become hard and cynical. I’m happy for Alice, I’m happy that she embraces everything that’s new, and still holds on to the things she lost. I honestly do believe that we let things go to easily, and I wish we would all hold on a little tighter to the things we love and the people that matter.
Liane Moriarty has written a terrific book, and I might be swayed to believe that the one book I read by her that I wasn’t into, was the anomaly and I’ll pick up another of her books in a heartbeat. She writes looong books, she get’s into details and she shapes characters. I wouldn’t cut out a single thing. Not everything in life is supposed to be fast and easy. I enjoy all the parts. And even though they are thick books, the pages fly by effortlessly.
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