"What Alice Forgot" Liane Moriarty

"Yes, okay, great, but she still thinks it's 1998."

"I do not," she said.  "I know it's 2008.  I just said that."

"But she still doesn't remember anything since 1998.  Or hardly anything.
She doesn't remember her children.
She doesn't remember her marriage breakup."

Her marriage breakup.
Her marriage was something that could be sliced up like a pizza.

This isn't a typical read for me, but I spent 3 hours in the DFW international terminal and, of course, had to buy a book.  The premise sounded interesting, and in fact it was a good plot device.  

Imagine waking up on a hospital stretcher thinking it was 1998, you are a newlywed in the middle of working on a new fixer-upper home and pregnant with your first child, only to find out that it is 2008 and you have forgotten everything about the last 10 years.  You don't remember your three children, your transformation from frumpy to svelte, or your estrangement from the love of your life.  This is what happens to Alice.

Her memory loss is a plot device through which to tell how Alice has changed over the past 10 years.  She doesn't recognize herself and has no memory of how she when from being carefree and happy to the stressed out super-mom that everyone says she is now.  Not knowing why, Alice experiences strong emotions as she passes certain intersections, as she is doing laundry and when she wears certain cologne.  She questions her sister, mother, grandmother and friends for clues about her life, trying to piece it all together.  She is desperately in love with her husband and hurt beyond words by the anger he feels towards her.  Her children are strangers to her, and most importantly, her oldest daughter, Madison, the one she remembers being pregnant with, is struggling with emotional problems that Alice can't fix because she doesn't remember what caused them.

The story of Alice's awakening to what her life had become is told by a limited third person narration, but Moriarty uses two other devices to fill in the gaps of how others are feeling.  Alice's sister, Elisabeth, writes a journal as "homework" for her therapist.  Elisabeth and her husband, Ben, are struggling through their own family issues, complicated by the distance that has grown between the two sisters during the past decade.  We learn Elisabeth's side of the problems and her reactions to them from her journal.  Alice's adopted grandmother, Frannie, also writes a first-person account, but in her case it is through letters to her fiance.  She has recently moved to a retirement community and is trying to sort out new relationships.  

Although I don't generally like contemporary middle class novels, Moriarty makes Alice, Elisabeth and Frannie sympathetic characters reacting in reasonable ways to real life struggles with family, pregnancy, love and life-long commitments.  She reminds us that relationships are so very complicated and that life forges on despite tragedy.  Alice gets the chance to step back from her life and see it through different eyes, and if there is a message to be had, it is that we should take the opportunity to do the same.  We let so many things, like work, take the place of what we think is missing in our lives or serve as a substitute for grief.  Moriarty reminds us that taking care of all the things in our in box is not what is really important.

An indication that this is a good read is that I kept thinking of the other people who would enjoy "Alice," and possibly, the people who need to read a book like this to help them get some perspective on their own lives.