The Remembering — Susan Sinnott

Some memories are treasured, re-read like a favourite book. Some are traumatic and won't stay buried. But memories can be unreliable, can fade and mutate. They affect our actions and choices.   

Memories of a happy marriage comfort Liz through widowhood, while flashbacks to a devastating sexual assault overwhelm her youngest daughter, Eve. Her middle daughter, Carlie, is building a new life in another country but longing for home is pulling her back, while Ginny, the eldest, takes on everyone's problems as her own. Eve's daughter, Rosie, remembers nothing of her absent father and yearns to track him down against her family's wishes.

 

Then Liz is diagnosed with dementia, and the family's resilience is tested as the matriarch begins to falter. If life is all memory, what is left when it's gone?  

 

Memory is at the core of all these women's lives: elusive, intrusive, helpful or misleading. What's revealed is a story about the struggle to maintain a sense of family, home, and self, amidst all life can throw at you.