Maybe a novelist’s real medium isn’t so much words, but the idea of memory itself. Every choice we make—voice, POV, backstory, moments buried as nothing or shouted as epiphany—is a matter of genre and taste. But it all comes from how we, or our characters, experience or recollect existence. Given how primal and important the idea of memory is to the novel’s architecture, it’s not surprising that authors often confront its opposite—memory loss.
My last novel Little Threats, leaned on memory as a thematic device and I didn’t quite grasp the importance of that to me at the time. Fiction is like that. When the subject ended up in my new novel, Sleeping With Friends, I was finally able to write about my own mother’s coma, but through the novel’s character, Mia. She’s a Connecticut housewife who may or may not have had an accident.
There are countless moving stories of memory loss. It’s a universal possibility, either through illness, or aging. But the books I’ve collected here do something different. For example: a drug that can curate memories and allow you to experience someone else’s. Someone hiring out a whole cast to act out and recreate what might be his only memory. An amnesiac detective trying to solve his own tormented past.
All these novels begin with the idea that memory loss could be something more than the act of forgetting. Each of these books take a risk, and offer something original, strange, and fantastic.
Remainder by Tom McCarthy
If, like me, you were browsing bookstores every weekend in the late-aughts, no doubt you spotted this book featured it in your local Staff Picks section—and for good reason. Remainder may be equal parts fever dream and intellectual exercise, but there’s more to it than that.
A man is severely injured in a mysterious accident and receives an enormous sum in legal compensation. He has no idea what to do with it. He winds up having a moment of déjà vu, what could be a dream, or maybe an actual memory, and decides to entirely recreate it—right down to the cracks in the wall and the smell of liver frying in a pan down the hall. But this involves buying an apartment building, and hiring actors to live there, practicing for this one significant scene. There’s intense foreboding as he descends further into his obsession: trying to recreate something that may or may not have ever been real. (And yes, McCarthy’s novel came out before the film Synecdoche, New York.)
Fledgling by Octavia Butler
This dystopian novel, which was Butler’s last, is really about the dividing line between one life and another. Shori is recovering from injuries in a cave and doesn’t know anything about herself. She turns out to appear like a ten-year-old though she is much older. She immediately instinctively hunts and eats an animal, but ordinary things, like rain, need to be remembered. “I was recognizing things now, at least by category—bushes, rocks, mud….”
Social constructs are at first unknown—since Shori has no memory—even as she wanders naked through a burned-out town where she wonders if she had in fact lived before. It’s this confusion at the world around her that fascinates me. And of course, Butler being Butler, she then builds everything back up so that we see it with fresh eyes.
The Shimmering State by Meredith Westgate
A photographer named Lucien finds himself at the Center, a California rehab where patients are given an experimental drug called Memoroxin (or Mem). It was developed for use among dementia suffers but is also the hip recreational drug of Hollywood because of its addictive voyeurism and ability to curate memories. It’s very Don DeLillo–esque—a very risky esque to try—but Westgate pulls off what could be a high-concept trick, making her own authentic comment on how we live and process in the moment, and after.
The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder
Originally published in 1994 but translated and named a best book of 2020 during the pandemic, The Memory Police’s easiest comparison is Nineteen Eighty-Four. Yet it sings with more poetry than Orwell’s plainspeak. As objects and concepts seem to disappear, only some of an island’s residents are able to remember them. “Transparent things, fragrant things . . . fluttery ones, bright ones . . . wonderful things you can’t possibly imagine,” the character’s mother tells him, showing him things she has hidden away that everyone else has forgotten. Ogawa tackles an impossible idea so skillfully, he makes us want to believe it.
Elizabeth Is Missing by Emma Healey
With delicate prose, Emma Healey is able to keep us grounded while also achieving a dreamlike effect. The mystery here is very meta: Maud, a woman living with Alzheimer’s, is trying to solve a missing persons case—her best friend who’s suddenly not at home, as well as her own sister who vanished 70 years ago. What is real, and what is imagined? What has been forgotten? And what does it mean when our concerns are dismissed by others?
In the Woods by Tana French
Gripping from the first word, Tana French has become known as a mystery maven for a reason. In this first book of her Dublin Murder Squad series, we begin by being taken into the narrator’s confidence about what he cannot trust of memory. We’re then launched into a precise police-report style recounting of a crime from 1984 of missing children in the woods near Knocknaree. It turns out our detective, Rob Ryan, is actually one of the victims—the one left alive. Trauma has taken his memories of that event. Rob now works as an investigator, so this is a double-case narrative. A 12-year-old girl has gone missing from the same woods, and he has to solve it—while also combing through his own traumatic past.
The Chimes by Anna Smaill
Amnesia through music… New Zealander author Anna Smaill is onto more than just a terrifying earworm here. In a fictional, primitive London, there’s an instrument called the Carillon—which enforces tinnitus, brainwashing its listeners until they can no longer remember. This happens ritually twice daily. Simon has traveled in from the country after his mother’s death, and befriends Lucien—the two teenagers roaming the city. Simon is on a mission to find out the meaning of what his mother told him on her deathbed.
Adjacentland by Rabindranath Maharaj
Adjacentland is an ahead-of-its-time novel which steers into eerie territory with its focus on creativity and AI. Our narrator awakes in a compound, where he comes to believe that he was once a comic book writer who warned that the reliance on artificial intelligence would make the imagination obsolete and subversive. As he searches for sketches, notes, and clues he may have left for himself before his memory loss, both he and the reader learn of Adjacentland, a primitive land of misfits and outsiders. It is only in Adjacentland that the imagination has survived. “Today is a new day but yesterday was the same day,” reads one of his foretelling sketches.