City of Belmont - Ruth Faulkner Public Library

All that I forgot, a memoir, Anne Howell

eng

autobiography

no index present

non fiction

All that I forgot

Anne Howell

a memoir

A gripping memoir that reads like a psychological thriller... What if you woke up in hospital one day thinking you were a girl aged nine, when instead you were a grown woman with a child? What if you could not remember giving birth to your daughter, did not know who your husband was or even remember how to read and write? And what if the people helping you remember all these things were not, in fact, telling you the truth? When Anne wakes in hospital, she is unable to recognise anyone or anything. She can talk but cannot remember much about the last five years, including, as it turns out, the birth of her daughter, her rocky relationship with a man who calls himself her husband, and a mysterious man she feels a deep longing for but is warned against. As Anne tries to recover and piece together what has happened, fragments of memory come back but do little to help and sometimes only confuse her further. The people in her life all tell a different story about her past and Anne is completely overwhelmed about who to believe. To her shock Anne soon learns that her 'husband' is not actually her husband but her partner whom she was on the verge of leaving before she fell ill. His strange behaviour is gradually revealed to be caused by his drug importation business and many years later he is actually arrested in Asia as being a kingpin of a drug cartel. The man she feels a deep longing for turns out to be a famous artist whom she has been having an off and on affair with, and Anne discovers that she was, in her former life, once a journalist for the SMH and wrote news-making stories on the criminal underbelly of Mosman in the 70s. Against this backdrop of unease and intrigue, Anne is forced to confront her new physical limitations, and try and work out the truth of who she is

adult