August 22, 2013

“What Alice Forgot” by Liane Moriarty – The Bliss of Forgetfulness

What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty (Book cover)Alice love is a bright and young woman whose entire life is full of potential and still ahead of her; she is madly in love with her husband and her first child is already on the way.

Fast forward to some years later, and Alice, now thirty-nine years of age, comes to the realization that she got dumped off the gravy train a while ago; she has three children, is headed for a divorce, her sister barely speaks to her at all, and above all, she cannot recognize herself anymore.

What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty is about Alice’s attempt to reconstruct the events which transpired in the past ten years of her life in order to not only understand why things got the point where they are, but whether or not she can actually start everything over in hopes of a brighter future.

As the title of the book points it out, Alice isn’t just having some kind of realization… she literally forgot all that happened in the past ten years. She still remembers herself as that happy 29 year-old, with no recollection of having her other two children, being on bad terms with her husband or her sister.

Moriarty does a very good job at making us feel Alice’s anxiety and horror when she makes all of those realizations, filling the beginning of the book with mostly sadness and despair.

What makes this book truly worth reading is the way in which Alice judges her current self, through the eyes of her former self. She doesn’t pull any punches, nor does she lie to herself in any way; she finds her current, 39 year-old persona to be the complete opposite of what she was only ten years ago.

We don’t get the whole story right away as the author turns this into a bit of a mystery, in the sense that we keep on wondering what could have transpired to turn her life around so drastically.

Little by little, we are fed bits and pieces of information through short flashbacks provoked by mostly insignificant details, and that actually turned out to be a very effective technique to keep us, the readers, interested in the story.

I really don’t want to give any more away than I already did seeing as how I believe it helps a lot to experience the book with a mindset as similar as possible to that of Alice, but I will say this: What Alice Forget ended up being, in my opinion, one of the most touching, attention-grabbing and emotional amnesia-based stories out there.

What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty (Book cover)

Everything from the characters themselves to the narrative techniques used make this book believable and allow you to become immersed in a quest for the forgotten truth.

This is one book I can recommend to virtually all readers who like their dramas and mysteries less gritty and violent while being slower-paced.



Liane Moriarty (Author)

Liane Moriarty


Personal site

Liane Moriarty is an Australian author, just like her sister, Jaclyn Moriarty. Before getting into the freelance writing business she worked in advertising and marketing and even ran her own company in the domain.

It was in 2004, after earning her masters degree at Macquarie University and publishing her first novel, Three Wishes, that Moriarty began her career as an author.

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