Review - What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty

Alice has an accident at the gym and when she wakes up she is being taken to hospital for possible concussion. She also cannot understand who is this Jane who is bossing her about or where her husband Nick is. She has forgotton the last ten years of her life with disastrous results for herself and everyone around. She has three children whom she cannot remember at all and thinks of them as toddlers whereas she is faced with the reality of three children who are in turns resentful, rude and loud in their protests of where there life is going.

Alice herself is horrified how she has turned out. She cannot imagine that she pays 150 Dollars for a personal trainer once a week, and that two cleaning ladies turn up on her doorstep to clean her house. She cannot understand where the relationship with her husband has gone and is dismayed to find out that she is "supposed" to be having an affair with the local school Principal!

Though we only know of Alice pre accident from snippets of the story you begin to realize that a transformation of Alice has taken place over 15 to 20 years and not a very nice one at that. In cases like this everyone wants the person to recover her memory so that she can go back to where she was, but in this case Alice does not want to go back to how she was prior to the accident. Alice does not like what she sees as pre accident and feels that her hopes and fears about a reconciliation with Nick will depend on her being anything but what she was like before the accident.

An unusual way of handling memory loss, lots of family fun, horrible teenagers acting out parents worst nightmares, light literature at its best.