I always say the same thing to these patients when they first come to me, convinced they are doomed to live a life with their ghosts, with their lost car keys never to be found. It gives them comfort when I tell them. It gives them comfort to know that all is not forgotten.You know the expression, “Good books don't make good movies”? There's something telling about the fact that All Is Not Forgotten sold its movie rights before anyone even heard of the book; but even so, it's not a terrible read; in fact, it's a notch above many of the bestsellers I've picked up this year. (It's probably also telling that the most liked review for this book on Goodreads gives it one star, while most of the other reviewers gave it four and five; I can understand why it's polarising.) I knew nothing about this book before going in, and as the slow unspooling and misdirections of the storytelling format are its greatest strengths, you might want to stop reading now to avoid even the mildest of spoilers.
All Is Not Forgotten begins with a confiding tone – someone is telling us a story about recent events to which he was merely an observer – and the story that is relayed is a very disturbing one: a fifteen-year-old girl has been brutally raped while walking in the woods after a drunken high school party, and when her distressed parents arrive at the hospital to see her, the attending doctor tells them of a new drug therapy that can erase all memory of traumatic events; a therapy, he assures the parents, that will allow their daughter to avoid PTSD and all other emotional long term effects of the attack. As time is of the essence, the parents agree to the treatment before they can really look into it, and within months, they need to acknowledge that all is not right: Jenny might have no conscious recall of the attack itself, but her subconscious is in turmoil, full of these negative emotions that she can't connect to memories. After another traumatic event, the family seeks the help of a psychiatrist who believes he can restore Jenny's memories, and it is at this point that the narrator introduces himself:
My name is Dr. Alan Forrester. I am a psychiatrist. In case you are unaware of the various credentials that exist among mental health professionals, I am the kind that went to medical school. I am a medical doctor, an M.D., graduated from Johns Hopkins University summa cum laude.As Forrester treats Jenny and her parents individually – learning about their secrets and hidden pasts – he is the only character who knows everything that is going on, and as an amateurish storyteller, he keeps needing to backtrack and make asides, saying, “I suppose at this point I should add...” or, “I'll get to these details later...” With a mystery at the heart of this book (the identity of the rapist), this format worked really well to create and maintain tension. And as Forrester is primarily reporting what other people have told him – including excerpts from the transcripts of therapy sessions – he is able to get around the “show don't tell” rule of storytelling; it even feels organic when he infodumps about the science of mind and memory. This all works really well, and about halfway through the book, you realise that Forrester has his own motives for being involved in the case – and as the psychiatrist begins to manipulate his patients (including implanting false memories and interfering with the police investigation) you begin to wonder who the sociopath in the story really is (and note: this isn't a Hannibal Lecter-type character, and more of an untrustworthy narrator than unreliable, but he does refer to himself as a puppetmaster and his actions are definitely immoral.) I fell for some misdirections, and as the story twisted to its big reveal, I have to acknowledge that the clues were there all along: Forrester never lies to the reader.
We are small, inconsequential beings. It is only our place in the hearts of others that fills us up, that gives us our purpose, our pride, and our sense of self. We need our parents to love us without condition, without logic, and beyond reason. We need them to see us through lenses warped by this love and to tell us in every way that just having us walk this earth fills them with joy. Yes, we will come to learn that our clay giraffes were not masterly. But when we pull them out of our attics, they should make us cry, knowing that when our parents saw these ugly pieces of plaster, they felt ridiculously misplaced pride, and they wanted to hug us until our bones hurt. This is what we need from our parents, more than the truth about how small we are. We will have more than enough people to remind us of that, to give us dispassionate evaluations of our mediocrity.According to author Wendy Walker, the memory-erasing drug therapy mentioned in the book is actually in the works and her goal with All Is Not Forgotten was to explore its unintended consequences. Yet, by layering on the manipulative psychiatrist and extenuating backstories, this book isn't really about any one thing; the therapy is a jumping-off point, not the focus (which is not a complaint, just an observation). As it was the (manipulative and condescending) narrative voice and circuitous storytelling that best worked for me in this book, I don't know how well this will work as a movie, but it certainly did have enough action to fill a couple of hours of screen time. I would give this book 3.5 stars if I could, but I can't quite justify rounding it up to four.
