What Alice Forgot: A Review
Hey hey! I'm back and feeling so much better. This means you actually get words from me and I have a lot today. I finished reading What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty a while ago but I'm just now getting to the review. It was well worth the wait because I wanted to give this review everything that I had. I really loved this book for so many reasons. Read on to find out why!
Alice Love is twenty-nine, crazy about her husband, and pregnant with her first child. So imagine Alice’s surprise when she comes to on the floor of a gym (a gym! She HATES the gym) and is whisked off to the hospital where she discovers the honeymoon is truly over — she’s getting divorced, , she has three kids, and she’s actually 39 years old. Alice must reconstruct the events of a lost decade, and find out whether it’s possible to reconstruct her life at the same time. She has to figure out why her sister hardly talks to her, and how is it that she’s become one of those super skinny moms with really expensive clothes. Ultimately, Alice must discover whether forgetting is a blessing or a curse, and whether it’s possible to start over.
What I Say:
What Alice Forgot is probably my favorite pick that we've read for the Literary Junkies so far. It's very real which makes it relatable and it's hilarious. I also enjoyed the fact that the ending was happy but realistic. It wasn't just "they lived happily ever after." It was more...they got back together, realized that marriage is hard but decided that the good times were worth all the bad moments too. Relationships are not easy and I'm sure once you add exhausting kids to the mix, it only gets harder.
One of the things we talked about in our Twitter chat was old Alice and young Alice. Which one was better? Why? Yadda yadda. Old Alice had unfortunately dealt with a lot in the last ten years. There was trauma and exhaustion which ultimately led to bitterness. She felt that she was the only one in the relationship with her husband, she felt that she was the only one taking care of the kids and she desperately needed some kind of companionship. Enter Gina. I see Gina as someone who unconsciously takes control of every situation and loves to be the center of attention. I feel like she was the type of person that if she was happy, so was everyone else. If she was mad at the world, so was everyone else. I'm not saying she was a bad person or utterly selfish, I just think that she was completely consumed in her own world. Alice, unfortunately, got sucked right into her vortex.
When young Alice appeared after ten years of fights and struggles, she gained a new perspective on this "Gina person" and her relationship with Nick (her husband). I'm not married but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that relationships are only as good as the two people in them. One person does not ruin a relationship, two people ruin a relationship. Young Alice was able to cut through the bitterness that old Alice had built up allowing her to make clearer decisions about everything in life once she got her memory back. You see, when Alice finally regained the last ten years of her memory, she was no longer young or old Alice. She was just Alice, a compilation of her young and old self ready to look at life with a new perspective. Thank God she did because it left her open enough to save her marriage, be a better mom to her kids and fix all the relationships that had suffered in the last ten years.
So I leave you with this question: if you lost the last five or ten years of your memory, what would you think of yourself today?