In My Library: What Alice Forgot

Friends, I think it's just time I came out and said it - I have a serious addiction.  To heroin.

Kidding!  I'm not at all skinny enough to be a junkie.  I'm addicted to books.  Which is way safer but probably pretty close to heroin in the wrecking-personal-time-management department.

My apologies to any junkies out there who just read this and got offended.

ANYWAY, I've finished yet another book and thought I'd share.

I picked up Liane Moriarty's What Alice Forgot on a whim.  I've been seriously engrossed in the Outlander series (which I've talked about before), and tossed this into the shopping basket when I was at Barnes & Noble to get book three.  Yeah, I'm probably the only person who doesn't get their books from Amazon.  I love going into a bookstore and spending my whole day wandering the aisles.  Another addiction maybe?

Back to the point... What Alice Forgot is set in Sydney, Australia in 2008.  A woman falls and hits her head at the gym and wakes up thinking she's 29, pregnant with her first child, and blissfully married to the love of her life.  Reality?  She's 39, has three kids, and is in the middle of a divorce.  Womp.  Alice has no memory whatsoever of the last ten years of her life, and apparently, she's become sort of a bitch because everyone she knows and loves kind of can't stand her.  So of course, she has to start piecing her life back together.  Interspersed with the story is her sister's "homework" for her shrink, and letters from her grandmother to a mysterious man named Phil.  

I really love the way Moriarty just tosses the reader into the situation without any backstory.  Usually this kind of thing annoys me, but she is able to make you feel present in the story.  

I wasn't all that sure how I felt about this book when I started it, but it was one of those stories that pull you in and before you know it you can't put it down.  It really made me think about my own life and marriage too.  Ryan and I do NOT have the perfect marriage, and we've been through some struggles lately.  This story put a lot of things in perspective for me - the big things in a relationship that we should never lose sight of (but so easily can), and the little things that slowly add up to big things.  Is it possible this book made me love Ryan more?  I think so.  It has definitely made me more conscious of the little snips and hurtful things we do to each other.  Not conscious in a way that makes me angrier, but conscious in a way that makes me want to stop them.  To protect this fragile thing Ryan and I hold between us.

It scares the shit out of me, but I want more than ever to experience this other kind of love Alice describes (you'll know what I mean by the end of the book), and that's something I didn't realize until I read this.  Funny how art imitates life, eh?