Remind Me Again What Happened

by Joanna Luloff Narrated by Shaun Grindell, Amy Landon, Xe Sands

Overview

Claire wakes in a hospital room in the Florida Keys. She has no idea how she got there or why. The loss of so many memories is paralyzing. Some things she can piece together by looking at old photos saved by her husband, Charlie, and her best friend, Rachel, and by combing through boxes of letters and casual jottings. But she senses a mystery at the center of all these fragments of her past, a feeling that something is not complete. Is Charlie still her husband? Is Rachel still her friend?



Told from alternating points of view that pull the reader into the minds of the three characters, the story unfolds as the smudge that covers Claire's memory is gradually, steadily wiped away, until finally she can understand the why and the how of her life. And then maybe she and Charlie and Rachel can move forward, but with their lives forever changed.



In Remind Me Again What Happened, debut novelist Joanna Luloff has written a moving and beautifully nuanced story of transience, the ebb and flow of time, and how relationships shift and are reconfigured by each day, hour, and minute.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

04/30/2018
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. (June)

From the Publisher

Disorienting and haunting, in all the best ways . . . a poignant story about love, friendship, and the secrets that keep people apart — and keep people together.”  
—Bustle

“Fascinating . . . A novel of sonorous character study, showing both the limits and allure of truly knowing another person—and oneself.”      
—Kirkus Reviews

“A thought-provoking exploration of love, relationships, and the role of the past in defining the present.”
—Booklist

“Using thriller conventions to meditate on memory, the novel . . . raises pointed questions about just how reliable any narrative of one’s life can be.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Claire wakes from a coma with only fragmented memories, and her struggle toward recovery is both a haunting mystery story and a beautiful meditation on the questions of what, exactly, identity, love and friendship are made up of. Remind Me Again What Happened is a gripping debut novel, and Joanna Luloff is a writer to watch!”   
—Dan Chaon, author of Ill Will

“Remind Me Again What Happened is a profound and elegiac exploration of the relationship between memory and identity, the way one has the power to remake the other. Joanna Luloff is a splendid writer, and this haunting novel is a wonderful testament to her gifts.”
—Laura van den Berg, author of Find Me

“I'm a great fan of Joanna Luloff's lovely book, The Beach at Galle Road. The aptly titled Remind Me Again What Happened takes it to another level. The novel is a powerful yet intimate, even achingly honest, examination of love, friendship, betrayal, and the limits of repentance. Highly recommended." 
—Peter Orner, author of Underground America

“A page-turner filled with depth, secrecy, and thrill that’ll have you questioning your own concept of truth and reality.”
—5280Magazine

“As secrets pop up through alternating perspectives, you won’t be able to put Remind Me Again What Happened Again down.”
—HelloGiggles.com

“This psychological thriller tells the story of shifts in time and how relationships are reconfigured each day.”
—BuzzFeed

Kirkus Reviews

2018-04-03
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.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171418489
Publisher:	HighBridge Company
Publication date:	06/26/2018
Edition description:	Unabridged

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