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The Woman Who Can't Forget is the beautifully written and
moving story of Jill's quest to come to terms with her extraordinary
memory, living with a condition that no one understood, including her,
until the scientific team who studied her finally charted the
extraordinary terrain of her abilities. Her fascinating journey speaks
volumes about the delicate dance of remembering and forgetting in all
of our lives and the many mysteries about how our memories shape us.
As we learn of Jill's struggles first to realize how unusual her
memory is and then to contend, as she grows up, with the unique
challenges of not being able to forget -- remembering both the good
times and the bad, the joyous and the devastating, in such vivid and
insistent detail -- the way her memory works is contrasted to a wealth
of discoveries about the workings of normal human memory and normal
human forgetting. Intriguing light is shed on the vital role of what's
called "motivated forgetting"; as well as theories about childhood
amnesia, the loss of memory for the first two to three years of our
lives; the emotional content of memories; and the way in which
autobiographical memories are normally crafted into an ever-evolving
and empowering life story.
Would we want to remember so much more of our lives if we could?
Which memories do our minds privilege over others? Do we truly relive
the times we remember most vividly, feeling the emotions that coursed
through us then? Why do we forget so much, and in what ways do the
workings of memory tailor the reality of what's actually happened to
us in our lives?
In The Woman Who Can't Forget, Jill Price welcomes us into
her remarkable life and takes us on a mind-opening voyage into what
life would be like if we didn't forget -- a voyage after which no
reader will think of the magical role of memory in our lives in the
same way again. |
