Alice is twenty-nine. She adores sleep, chocolate, and her ramshackle new house. She's newly engaged to the wonderful Nick and is pregnant with her first baby.
There's just one problem. All that was ten years ago ...
Alice has slipped in a step-aerobics class, hit her head and lost a decade. Now she's a grown-up, bossy mother of three in the middle of a nasty divorce and her beloved sister Elisabeth isn't speaking to her. This is her life but not as she knows it.
Clearly Alice has made some terrible mistakes. Just how much can happen in a decade? Can she ever get back to the woman she used to be?'
After reviewing Liane Moriarty’s The Hypnotist’s Love Story, I was inspired to go back and read her previous novel What Alice Forgot. This is the fourth book I’ve read as part of the AWW2012Challenge.
I must admit that I found this book hard to
read at the beginning. It annoyed me that the novel deals with such a serious
topic in a light-hearted way. To me the characters seemed a little
one-dimensional. Alice
sustains a head injury that causes severe memory loss and yet everyone is so
flippant about it. I didn’t like Alice
all that much, mainly because I couldn’t quite get a handle on who she was.
But as the story progressed and Alice returns to her
house and her life, I slowly started to understand her. The twenty-nine year
old Alice is carefree and focused on love, but
the way her family and friends talk about the thirty-nine year old Alice it becomes clear
just how much motherhood and marriage has changed her. I was intrigued to see
why, and how, someone could shift their perspective on life so drastically. By
this time I was hooked and desperate to know how this story would work out.
I liked that this story made me think about
who I used to be, as well as who I have become as I’ve grown up. Alice was
reminded over the course of the story that it is important to grow up but also
to hold on to that youthful view of the world. At times we need to be serious
and mature, but we also need to relax and let go too. To just have fun and be present,
rather than let ourselves get caught up in our day to day responsibilities.
The story also showed a genuine progression
of a marriage – from the carefree loved-up days when it’s just the two of you,
to the ‘mum’ and ‘dad’ days where the love you had can get lost in a sea of
duties. Love changes. People change. Everything is just a phase. Sometimes
there are wonderful phases, sometimes there are tough phases.
While reading I kept thinking of the adage ‘This
too shall pass’. That’s what I consider to be the theme of this story – that memories
(both good and bad) make up our lives, but really it is the present moment that
is most important. We need to savour the good times. And during the bad times
we need to remember that this too shall end and all will return to normal again
at some point. This is life; the ups and the downs.
When I reviewed The Hypnotist’s Love Story,
I thought the theme to that novel could be 'trust in life'. What Alice Forgot is certainly all about life as well. It seems Liane Moriarty likes
to explore the complexities of life in her books and I know that is why I have
enjoyed her writing. While What Alice Forgot starts out carefree it does become
much more thought-provoking as the story progresses. In hindsight I see this
is much the same as Alice herself and just goes to show that novels, like
people, have room to be a multitude of shifting personalities.
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