REVIEW:

When you read hundreds of books a year like I do, people often ask how you can possibly remember details about them all. The honest answer is I don’t. What I do remember is how each and every one made me feel.

Novelist and neuroscientist Lisa Genova’s first nonfiction book, Remember, made me feel better, relieved, and normal. Alzheimer’s runs in my family (as it does for far too many people), so anytime a word fails me or a memory escapes me I worry all is lost. Here Genova explains in a very approachable way that the brain just ages like any other part of the body. It’s OK to get glasses for decreasing eyesight when you get to that point, and it’s OK to google things for decreasing memory recall. Hooray!

I loved how she even acknowledges in an Appendix that you’ve probably forgotten much of what you just read and helpfully recaps the major points. Talk about knowing your audience! I do hope it’s an audience that continues to grow, because I believe everyone could benefit from reading Remember. It’s a 5-star book marred only by Genova’s incessant name dropping. I certainly won’t be forgetting that she runs in circles with Jessica Chastain and George Clooney anytime soon.

PUBLISHER SYNOPSIS:

A fascinating exploration of the intricacies of how we remember, why we forget, and what we can do to protect our memories, from the Harvard-trained neuroscientist and bestselling author of Still Alice.

Have you ever felt a crushing wave of panic when you can't for the life of you remember the name of that actor in the movie you saw last week, or you walk into a room only to forget why you went there in the first place? If you're over forty, you're probably not laughing. You might even be worried that these lapses in memory could be an early sign of Alzheimer's or dementia. In reality, for the vast majority of us, these examples of forgetting are completely normal. Why? Because while memory is amazing, it is far from perfect. Our brains aren't designed to remember every name we hear, plan we make, or day we experience. Just because your memory sometimes fails doesn't mean it's broken or succumbing to disease. Forgetting is actually part of being human.

In Remember, neuroscientist and acclaimed novelist Lisa Genova delves into how memories are made and how we retrieve them. You'll learn whether forgotten memories are temporarily inaccessible or erased forever and why some memories are built to exist for only a few seconds (like a passcode) while others can last a lifetime (your wedding day). You'll come to appreciate the clear distinction between normal forgetting (where you parked your car) and forgetting due to Alzheimer's (that you own a car). And you'll see how memory is profoundly impacted by meaning, emotion, sleep, stress, and context. Once you understand the language of memory and how it functions, its incredible strengths and maddening weaknesses, its natural vulnerabilities and potential superpowers, you can both vastly improve your ability to remember and feel less rattled when you inevitably forget. You can set educated expectations for your memory, and in doing so, create a better relationship with it. You don't have to fear it anymore. And that can be life-changing.