Remind Me Again What Happened

April 15, 2018
A woman's amnesia strains her relationships with her husband and her best friend.Married couple Claire and Charlie and their dearest friend, Rachel, have a long, complicated history and a friendship so close it's more like family. Rachel and Charlie met in a modernist poetry seminar when she was studying abroad in England. They had a shy but loving romance of their own, and he moved with her to Boston to go to graduate school, where together they met Claire. When Rachel's parents died in a car accident, first Claire and then Charlie moved into her childhood home and took care of her through her intense grief. Claire has been leading the trio through their lives ever since. When Rachel became pregnant and decided against keeping it and against telling Charlie, Claire helped her through. When Rachel, in her sadness about this choice, turned away from Charlie, Claire took her place as his romantic partner. When Charlie got a job in Vermont, Claire moved with him, convincing them both that it would work. But now it's Claire who needs to be led. A traveling journalist working on a story in India, she has been away from Vermont and from Charlie for some time, literally and emotionally, when she's bitten by a mosquito and contracts Japanese encephalitis, leading to seizures and brain damage: "There is a smudge where [her] memories are supposed to be." She is unstable, unwell, unable to remember her life from her late teens through her most recent writing assignments, knowing only that she awoke alone in a hospital in Florida. Occasionally a floating memory comes forth--of a moment in the shared kitchen of their youth or, more recently, of a mysterious photographer named Michael--but mostly Claire is at a loss. She hates it, a normally independent and fearless woman trapped by her health--and her husband hates it, too, as the dynamics of their relationship lurch dramatically away from the usual. Over the course of the novel, told through the friends' three alternating points of view, shared and unshared memories are revealed as Charlie and Rachel care for Claire and as Claire works to put it all back together. Each has secrets, and secreted resentments, of which Luloff's (The Beach at Galle Road, 2012) slow unearthing is fascinating and thorough.A novel of sonorous character study, showing both the limits and allure of truly knowing another person--and oneself.

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April 30, 2018
Luloff’s pensive debut novel (following the story collection The Beach at Galle Road) uses amnesia as a metaphor for the kind of daily forgetting that makes any long relationship possible. Journalist Claire Scott, who has been working in India, wakes up one day to discover that she is in a hospital in Florida. She can’t remember how she got there, or much else about her life from her teens to her present age of 34, and regular seizures leave her debilitated. Once she gets out of the hospital, she moves to the house in Vermont she shared with her husband, Charlie. Charlie and Claire’s old best friend, Rachel, who remind her that they all shared a house 10 years ago in graduate school, keep an eye on her. The tension builds as Claire tries to determine how much she can trust the two people who have devoted themselves to her recovery. The book loses some momentum as the pieces of the puzzle fall into place; the triangle formed by the three protagonists—essentially the only people in the novel—is perhaps too predictable; and the conclusion is far-fetched. Using thriller conventions to meditate on memory, the novel nonetheless raises pointed questions about just how reliable any narrative of one’s life can be.

May 1, 2018
In an intricate dance between three characters, Luloff explores memory and its importance in forming identity. Claire, Charlie, and Rachel have been indispensable to each other for years. But the relationship is knocked askew when Claire, a journalist on assignment in India, contracts Japanese B encephalitis, experiencing high fevers, seizures, central-nervous-system damage, and a smudge where her memories, from late teens to the present, are supposed to be. Even before her near-fatal illness, her marriage to Charlie was in trouble, as she wandered the globe while Charlie stayed put as a small-town newspaper editor in Vermont. Now he resents her loss of the memories of their life together. So they call on Rachel, who brought the trio together, in the hope that she can save them, as Claire struggles with the restrictions her brain damage has placed upon her. From Luloff (The Beach at Galle Road, 2012), this is a thought-provoking exploration of love, relationships, and the role of the past in defining the present.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)