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The Woman Who Can't Forget
Jill Price
The Extraordinary Story of Living with the Most Remarkable Memory Known to Science--A Memoir
Free Press
May 2008
On Sale: May 6, 2008
272 pages
ISBN: 1416561765
EAN: 9781416561767
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
Jill Price has the first diagnosed case of a memory
condition called "hyperthymestic syndrome" -- the
continuous, automatic, autobiographical recall of every day
of her life since she was fourteen. Give her any date from
that year on, and she can almost instantly tell you what day
of the week it was, what she did on that day, and any major
world event or cultural happening that took place, as long
as she heard about it that day. Her memories are like scenes
from home movies, constantly playing in her head, backward
and forward, through the years; not only does she make no
effort to call her memories to mind, she cannot stop them. The Woman Who Can't Forget is the beautifully written and
moving story of Jill's quest to come to terms with her
extraordinary memory, living with a condition that no one
understood, including her, until the scientific team who
studied her finally charted the extraordinary terrain of her
abilities. Her fascinating journey speaks volumes about the
delicate dance of remembering and forgetting in all of our
lives and the many mysteries about how our memories shape us. As we learn of Jill's struggles first to realize how unusual
her memory is and then to contend, as she grows up, with the
unique challenges of not being able to forget -- remembering
both the good times and the bad, the joyous and the
devastating, in such vivid and insistent detail -- the way
her memory works is contrasted to a wealth of discoveries
about the workings of normal human memory and normal human
forgetting. Intriguing light is shed on the vital role of
what's called "motivated forgetting"; as well as theories
about childhood amnesia, the loss of memory for the first
two to three years of our lives; the emotional content of
memories; and the way in which autobiographical memories are
normally crafted into an ever-evolving and empowering life
story. Would we want to remember so much more of our lives if we
could? Which memories do our minds privilege over others? Do
we truly relive the times we remember most vividly, feeling
the emotions that coursed through us then? Why do we forget
so much, and in what ways do the workings of memory tailor
the reality of what's actually happened to us in our lives? In The Woman Who Can't Forget, Jill Price welcomes us into
her remarkable life and takes us on a mind-opening voyage
into what life would be like if we didn't forget -- a voyage
after which no reader will think of the magical role of
memory in our lives in the same way again.
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