Failing memory provides infinite stories, both fictional and factual, classic, and new. These are a collection of fiction, memoirs, and films with characters living with memory loss, working to reconcile the discovery with their ideas of their relationships, their lives, their identities, and the effects on family and friends.
Still Alice by Lisa Genova
50-year-old Alice Howland leads a very busy, productive life as a psychology professor at Harvard, the spouse of a biology professor, and the mother of two grown daughters. She learns that she is suffering from Alzheimer’s, and the subsequent months and years see a steady decline in her abilities. Still Alice, depicts both the unalterable course of the disease and the various ways family members can cope with it. Clearly explaining the testing, treatment options, and symptoms of the disease within the context of an absorbing family drama.
We Were Liars by E. Lockhart
Spending the summers on her family’s private island off the coast of Massachusetts with her cousins and a special boy named Gat, teenaged Cadence struggles to remember what happened during her fifteenth summer.
What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty
Suffering an accident that causes her to forget the last ten years of her life, Alice is astonished to discover that she is thirty-nine years old, a mother of three children, and in the midst of an acrimonious divorce from a man she dearly loves.
Never Never by Colleen Hoover and Tarryn Fisher
Never stop…Never forget…Just remember. Charlie Wynwood and Silas Nash have been best friends since they could walk. They’ve been in love since the age of fourteen. But every memory has vanished. Now Charlie and Silas must work together to uncover the truth about what happened to them and why.
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks
Tells the stories of individuals afflicted with fantastic perceptual and intellectual aberrations: patients who have lost their memories and with them the greater part of their pasts; who are no longer able to recognize people and common objects. They are studies of life struggling against incredible adversity, and they enable us to enter the world of the neurologically impaired, to imagine with our hearts what it must be to live and feel as they do.
The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
2011 Man Booker Prize Winner. Memory, is imperfect, especially when it comes to the past. Tony Webster and Adrian Finn swore to stay friends forever. Until Adrian’s life took a turn into tragedy, and all of them, especially Tony, moved on and did their best to forget.
The Flight Attendant by Chris Bohjalian
Cassandra Bowden enjoys her job with the airline making it easy to find adventure, and the occasional binge-drinking blackouts seem to be inevitable. Then she wakes up in the wrong hotel, in the wrong bed, with a dead man – and no idea what happened.
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Remember: The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting by Lisa Genova
From the Harvard-trained neuroscientist and bestselling author of Still Alice. Forgetting is part of being human. Reading this book will help you appreciate the difference between normal forgetting and forgetting due to Alzheimer’s. You can set expectations for your memory not fear it anymore.
The Father
A man refuses all assistance from his daughter as he ages. As he tries to make sense of his changing circumstances, he begins to doubt his loved ones, his own mind, and even the fabric of his reality.