Sean Wilson is the author of Gemini Falls. He has been shortlisted for the Patrick White Playwrights Award by Sydney Theatre Company.
Sean’s new novel is You Must Remember This.
On a warm autumn evening Grace decides to go for walk. It must be autumn judging from the temperature, and Grace was going to… she’s well, surely it will come back to her.
Hours later, and with her family panicked Grace will be helped home by the police.
Grace's daughter Liz assures her she’ll like her new room, but nothing feels quite right and Grace is sure things keep going missing.
As Grace searches for a foothold in her new home she finds that the past and the present seem to blur. Moments of time blend into memories and Grace is thrown back across her life trying to make sense of it all.
I’m going to start with a strong recommendation because You Must Remember This is a novel that brings heart, intelligence and literary verve to the topic of dementia.
Ranging across Grace’s life, You Must Remember This is a story of love and family and the struggle to hold onto your very sense of self in the face of failing memory.
The reader travels with Grace through her life and through the stylistic device of a melange of chapters we are given some insight into Grace’s experience of the world. Between the pages Wilson has created a linear narrative and then parsed it erratically to try and capture Grace’s own sense of confusion and the unsettling nature of memories blurring. The overall effect is less of memory loss, than of the overwhelming sense that all of life is happening in an unfiltered and uncontrolled way.
The figure of Grace is alluring for her vulnerability but also for her strength. As her past unfolds we learn about her childhood and come to see what shaped the woman she is. This story engages deftly and with compassion the issue of making Grace a whole person and not simply an object of pity. As we move between generations of mothers and daughters, always with Grace as our anchor we are shown how that life has worked on so many others.
Novels have a tricky way of trying to impose order onto events and create these things we call stories. They give us hope that we will find meaning in a sequence of moments. This is very much something that Grace finds is slipping from her, ever more, the harder she tries to grasp it.
In Wilson’s hands we are shown how Grace works through this and also how sometimes she simply must experience life in its jumble. It’s humbling as a reader to have our expectations overturned and then work to discover a new way of seeing through Grace’s eyes.
You Must Remember This is a slim book that came to occupy an outsized space in my thoughts. It offers compassion and the opportunity to understand through the character of Grace and perhaps in the way we carry our experience of reading back into our everyday lives.
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